As the battle for Marjah goes on, NATO is making plans for an even larger campaign in Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city and a center of the Taliban insurgency.

To help manage that growing effort, the Wall Street Journal reports the U.S. and its allies will create a new U.S.-led command in Southeast Afghanistan.

For more on the challenges that lie ahead, Daljit Dhaliwal interviews Marvin Weinbaum, a scholar at the Middle East Institute and former State Department analyst on Afghanistan.

To shed light on the legacy of conflict in Afghanistan, our German partner Deutsche Welle reports on the lessons of Russia’s long war there through the experience of one former soldier.

On Tuesday, with the election two days away and the campaign winding down, the Taliban launched a series of attacks on the capital city of Kabul. A suicide car bomber attacked a NATO convoy on the outskirts of the city, killing at least seven people and wounding another 50. Two mortar rounds also landed near the presidential palace.

U.S. President Barack Obama insists winning the war in Afghanistan is vital to America’s security interests, and a free and fair election no doubt would help that cause. But security concerns remain front and center.

Zeina Khodr of Worldfocus partner Al Jazeera English reports on the dangers in the southern city of Kandahar — from the safety of her car.

British and Canadian soldiers meet with their Afghan counterparts.

The marine brushing his teeth at the basin next to me was carrying his M-16 cross chest on his back. The gun stared right at my limbs. I rinsed my face and as I looked up, another soldier appeared to my right. He raised his arm to brush his teeth and his revolver peeked out of the case under his arm. I thought to myself, Where else in the world could I be rinsing my face in the presence of two no-bulls**t guys armed with weapons, and still be able to get out alive?

Call me stupid, but I might very well be on the safest place on earth right now.

At the base, it’s easy to witness a life far from the war. Sure, there are faces overrun by emotions — some who’ve lost their friends, some who’d just landed in a bizarre desert so far from home and some who’d seen it all and were ready to face it all. But these same fingers that are ready to pull the trigger are also seen scrolling their iPods, playing fussball, holding a non-alcoholic Beck’s or even swinging away their guitars.

Like any other profession, the soldiers here make it clear that to produce results, you have to stay sane. If anything is different, it’s how they choose to absorb that sanity.

My personal favorites are the bathroom doors. It almost seems like the first person updates their Facebook status and a serpent of comments follow it. The one that immediately comes to mind is from this morning. Someone started, “Chuck Norris is a coward.” Here is what followed:

[...]When Chuck does a push up, he doesn’t push himself up, he pushes the world down.

When the soldiers are not chatting about Chuck Norris in the “ablution room,” they go to one of the refreshment houses — and most member countries have one of these club-like lounges for their troops, where you can get everything from a haircut to a non-alcoholic beer to a ping pong table. The other lively place is known as the “Board Walk,” a mini version of a stadium, built with wooden planks. Inside, local Afghanis set up shops to sell paintings, arts and crafts.

But the best entertainment for some of these soldiers is us, the journalists. I could hardly claim a good sense of humor, but some of the Canadian journalists down here are hilarious. Immediately after finishing a briefing today, where we were told that the Afghan National Army and the Security Forces had a successful operation in Salavat, a fellow journalist offered a tactic to lure the Taliban next time around.

“Call the pizza place and tell them to deliver it to the Talibans,” he said. “We could call them Pie-EDs.”

- Anup Kaphle

Photo courtesy of Flickr user lafrancevi under a Creative Commons license.

Tribal leaders in Afghanistan.

The U.S.military may begin reaching out to tribal militias for assistance in fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda as it reviews its strategy in Afghanistan.

Alex Strick and Felix Kuehn are researchers living in Kandahar and the co-founders of AfghanWire. They write at From the Frontline about the problems of this strategy and Afghan sentiment towards militias.

Panicked Solutions

Special agents from America, Germany and Pakistan are sent to a zoo in Afghanistan to track down some missing rabbits. The western agents start looking around, surveying the field, setting up field offices and establishing contacts. The Pakistani agent goes straight to a zebra.

A few days later, the others still haven’t been able to find a rabbit, so they go over to the Pakistani agent to see how he’s getting along. When they come closer they see him beating the zebra with a big pole, shouting at the top of his lungs: “SAY I’M A RABBIT! SAY I’M A RABBIT!”

This joke was told by a highly respected tribal elder in Kandahar last week at the end of a long and frustrating conversation about American plans to engage the tribes in Afghanistan and their apparent decision to support the (re-)formation of local militias.

It would have been funnier were the situation down here not so critical. Daily NATO bombing throughout the region, occasional suicide attacks within the city, pervasive and unashamed corruption, rising food and fuel prices, and an increasingly brutal campaign of assassinations are just some of the features of everyday life for the average Kandahari.

There is no feeling that the central government in Kabul projects a legitimate source of authority down here either. The reputation of that government – and foreign powers by association – has been muddied over the past 7 years. The early years of US raids and night abductions in Kandahar are still not forgotten; massive and unfiltered corruption has permeated to all levels of the government, often working from top-down and bottom-up at the same time; involvement of these government figures in the drug business goes on at a very high level; the central authorities are too weak to implement their decisions (and are perceived as such), and the parliament functions only as a shadow of itself; there has been no media campaign of any sophistication or that is able to respond with the speed that the Taliban themselves have proved capable; there is a concomitant lack of visible signs of development money – and much vanished in submissions back to western countries anyway; and there has been an effective, sophisticated and prioritized Taliban information and media campaign noting all of the above.

Despite this situation, on Tuesday Afghan parliamentarians emphatically spoke out against President Karzai’s own plan to arm local tribes against the Taliban drawn up by the Tribal Commission. MPs argued that the Afghan army and police force should be strengthened instead.

The authors’ own incidental experience talking to people from all kinds of backgrounds in Kandahar also offers overwhelming evidence that people fear the return of the militias. “If the militia comes, they will do everything,” explained one friend. “They will rape my boys and my wife. There will be no more government. Now we have maybe thirty percent law in the city. With the militia there will be none. It will be the end.”

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Photo courtesy of Flickr user keith stanski under a Creative Commons license.