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| Moving inland: Taliban fighters, like those shown here, have moved away from the Pakistani border, taking control of major Afghan roads. Saee Ali Achakzai/Reuters/file |
Taliban move closer to Kabul
The South Korean kidnapping brings to 60 the number of people taken in one Afghan province since April.
from the July 24, 2007 edition
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The German government has refused to bow to the captors' demands: the removal of its 3,000 troops from Afghanistan. South Korea, however, has banned any citizen from traveling to Afghanistan, with penalties that reach as high as one year in jail or a $3,200 fine. It had already decided to withdraw its troops by year-end, even before the kidnapping. South Korea, according to the Associated Press, has 210 troops (including 150 in a medical unit) that have been stationed at the US Bagram air base since 2002.
Experts agree that the Korean aid workers (18 women and five men who are members of an evangelical Christian church doing medical and education work) made several key errors in judgment. It is widely known that the highway they were traveling is not secure for foreigners. Yet despite their obviousness as foreigners, they chartered a private bus for the seven-hour trip to Kandahar, in the heart of the insurgency.
Despite the increased attention on kidnapping in Afghanistan, those who are caught remain those who make basic mistakes, says Mr. Lee of ANSO: "They make really poor security decisions."
The Ghazni seizure is believed to be the largest single kidnapping in Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Yet it falls into the same pattern of other kidnappings here, which focus largely on targeting anyone seen to be working on behalf of the Western-backed government – be they aid workers, security personnel, or politicians. There appears to be no obvious trend beyond that, Lee says: No one group – foreign or local – seems to be targeted more than another.
The increasing instability on Kabul's southern doorstep is a concern for President Hamid Karzai's government and its allies. The insurgency has always been centered in the south, where the Taliban was born from ultraconservative Pashtun tribes. But it is creeping northward and farther from Pakistan.
"It is getting farther away from the border," says Ms. Nathan. "What was cross-border is becoming local."
In recent months, suicide bombings in the far north – in Badakhshan and Kunduz – also suggest an attempt to widen the theater of combat, at least superficially. The attempt is more deeply rooted in Ghazni, where the Taliban can attempt to marshal support from a disaffected local populace made up largely of conservative farmers. Local Taliban have been reinforced by Taliban from the deeper south, says Lee.
This does not necessarily suggest growing sympathy for militant Islam. Rather it indicates that some Afghans have lost their patience with the government and are turning against it. The effect has been to constrict the flow of trade on roads south of Kabul, cutting it off from a major trading partner, Pakistan.
"I don't think there is any plan to assault Kabul; they just need to isolate it," says Lee. "Attacking a main supply route in a war is just what happens."
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