I can’t help from wondering if new Afghan NATO commander Gen. David Petraeus plea for unity is letting the country’s Interior Ministry take credit for announcing a sting operation that killed 63 insurgents and confiscated 16 tons of opium.
All the news accounts of the bloody sting in southern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border indicated only that some locals may have been undercover agents who infiltrated the drug processing plants blown to smithereens.
The Interior announcement came simultaneously with Petraeus declaring Sunday “we are in this to win” upon his arrival to take command in Kabul.
Earlier he had met with U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and Afghan president Hamid Karzai to repair fences strained by disparaging comments from his predecessor, Gen. Stanley McChystal who was fired.
Petraeus has to the end of the year to show progress in turning back an emboldened enemy and convince both the Afghan people and neighboring countries that the U.S. is committed to preventing Afghanistan from again becoming a haven for al-Qaida and its terrorist allies. That’s when the Obama’s Afghan/Pakistan counterinsurgency plan comes under a scheduled public review according to the plan’s time table.
A one-battle death toll of 63 in a span of hours is high for this war which is why I think it unusual that the statement came from the Interior Ministry.
The statement said all killed were “terrorists,” referring to Taliban-linked insurgents.
Two factories for converting opium into heroin were destroyed and “a large number” of weapons and ammunition were also seized in the raids, begun Friday by Afghan counternarcotics commandos supported by NATO troops, it added.
The commandos also freed 10 villagers captured by rebels for allegedly working with the government while arresting 10 rebels and drugs traffickers, the statement said.
The raid occurred in Bahramcha district of Helmand province, center of a Taliban-led insurgency and Afghanistan’s biggest poppy-growing region, the interior ministry said.
Afghanistan is near last in world gross national product but first in heroin production. About $3 billion annually fuels the Taliban insurgency and U.S. officials believe line the pockets of Karzai’s crooked government ministers and their deputies.
Jerry Remmers worked 26 years in the newspaper business. His last 23 years was with the Evening Tribune in San Diego where assignments included reporter, assistant city editor, county and politics editor.