http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/23/world/asia/taliban-rise-again-in-afghanistans-north.html
CHAHAR DARA, Afghanistan — The last time Afghans in the northern province of Kunduz felt so threatened by the Taliban was in 2009, just before President Obama deployed thousands of troops to push the insurgents back from the outskirts of the province’s capital.
Now the Taliban are back, but the cavalry will not be coming.
With just two months left before the formal end of the 13-year international combat mission, Western officials insist that the Afghan security forces have managed to contain the Taliban’s offensives on their own. But the insurgents’ alarming gains in Kunduz in recent weeks present a different picture.
In an area that has not been a primary front against the Taliban for years, there are now two districts almost entirely under Taliban rule, local officials say. The Taliban are administering legal cases and schools, and even allowing international aid operations to work there, the officials say.
The new Afghan government under President Ashraf Ghani has acknowledged the depth of the crisis, telling local officials in a videoconference that Kunduz’s situation was a priority on a par with major battle fronts in the Taliban-heavy south and east this year. Already, troop reinforcements have been sent from Mazar-i-Sharif, the main city in the north.
Taken together with new Defense Ministry statistics showing a huge rise in combat deaths for the Afghan Army and police forces, the losses in Kunduz point out a deeper-than-expected concern about the ability of the security forces to hold territory without Western troops directly entering the fight.
Local residents and officials in three of the province’s most challenged areas, the Chahar Dara, Dasht-e-Archi and Imam Sahib districts, described a military and police force unable to mount effective operations. Rather than pushing back on the ground, Afghan forces have opted to shell areas near the capital under Taliban control. That has led to the deaths of more than a dozen civilians this summer, villagers claim.
“The Taliban could take the city any time they want to,” said Hajji Aman, a businessman in Kunduz City, who has been highly critical of the government’s response to the crisis. “They just don’t want to bother with holding and managing it right now.”
The Kunduz crisis is unfolding late in a year that has already included numerous Taliban advances. A number of provinces, including Nangarhar, Helmand and Kapisa, have become testing grounds for a changing war, where the Taliban have been more willing to gather in large groups to confront Afghan forces now that coalition air support has been scaled back.
The result has been a huge rise in Afghan casualties. In new figures released this week, the Defense Ministry said that 950 soldiers had been killed from March to August, the worst rate of the 13-year war. The police, the first line of defense against most attacks, have registered even more devastating numbers: 2,200 dead during the same period, also a record.
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