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 A day after foreign troops left the crucial base in Helmand, the
Afghan army and police prepared to fight on their own without the
safety net of air support and aerial surveillance formerly provided
by their Western allies.
The last U.S. Marine unit in Afghanistan and the last British combat
forces were airlifted out of their former regional headquarters on
Monday, a symbolic end to more than a decade of U.S.-led fighting
against the Taliban.
What happens next in Helmand could be indicative of Afghanistan's
wider ability to protect itself against the Taliban, and any
imminent escalation of hostilities in the province would be a major
concern to regional powers.
Helmand has been one of the deadliest battlefields of the war which
has seen some of this year’s fiercest fighting.
The international military coalition is now in the process of ending
its mission nationwide by year-end and shifting to a support role
with only a few thousand military personnel.
"I’m certain we can maintain the security," said Maj. Gen. Sayed
Malouk, commander of the Afghan National Army’s 215 Corps that has
taken over the base. It is due to become a training center and house
about 1,800 Afghan soldiers.
Malouk said Afghan forces were already fighting mostly on their own
without relying to foreign troops. For the past year, he said, the
safety net of the U.S. and British forces had mostly been
psychological.
"They were in the battlefield. No district has been taken over by
the Taliban," he said.
RESURGENT TALIBAN
The Taliban may not yet control much territory in Helmand but the
insurgents, who ruled Afghanistan with a harsh interpretation of
Islamic law from 1996 to 2001, have been launching increasingly
fierce attacks, testing the abilities of Afghan forces.
Some 4,000 Afghan soldiers and police have died nationwide this year
fighting the Taliban, along with 66 international forces, according
to Lt. Col Joseph Anderson, the second-in-command for international
forces in Afghanistan.
The district of Sangin was particularly contested, in part because
it is the hometown of a number of Taliban leaders and also because
it lies on a transit route for the lucrative $3 billion opium
smuggling business that fuels the insurgency.
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U.S. Brig. Gen. Daniel Yoo, the commander who handed over the
Helmand base over the weekend, said the Afghan forces proved their
mettle in the fight for Sangin.
"A lot of the stuff you heard about was tactical-level, checkpoints
changing hands. But never where they lost a checkpoint they couldn’t
take it back," he said.
He added that while the international coalition provided some
intelligence and close air support, foreign forces never fired a
shot to help Afghan forces in Sangin.
"We didn’t do any fire support for them. It was mostly themselves."
He said that he and Malouk met for months to plan the handover of
the Helmand base, and that by the time the last international
perimeter guards pulled back to board the final helicopters out,
specially trained Afghan security forces moved in to take up the
exact same positions.
He said he had confidence in the Afghans' ability to hold Helmand
and the base, but if worse comes to worst, help was not far away –
there are international forces at a base in Kandahar province 100
miles (160 km) away.
“Everything that we did for them, they can do from Kandahar," Yoo
said. "They really could."
(Editing by Maria Golovnina)
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