Troops Reticent About Obama’s Afghan Strategy

JUDY WOODRUFF:

That follows two takes on reaction to President Obama's upcoming announcement that he will send more troops to Afghanistan.

The first comes from Ben Gilbert of Global Post, part of our new partnership with that international news Web site. I talked with Gilbert by phone earlier today from Kandahar Airfield.

Ben, thank you for talking with us.

Tell us, remind us where Kandahar is and why it's important to the military.

BEN GILBERT:

Kandahar City is the provincial capital of Kandahar Province, which is in Southern Afghanistan. And Kandahar is the original founding city of the Taliban.

They came out of this town, of this city, actually, a city of 500,000 to 800,000 people, in 1994. It is — the U.S. and NATO generals have called it the gravity — or the center of gravity of Southern Afghanistan, and they have put particular emphasis on the necessity of securing this town.

In this area in Southern Afghanistan, the NATO forces here that the U.S. is a part of is called — the area of operations is called Regional Command South. What that is, is the largest area of operations within the NATO international security force in Afghanistan.

It's about 34,000 troops right now. The bulk of them are U.S. troops. The Afghan police and army are supposed to be in control of the city of Kandahar, but actually the Taliban has established their own courts there. They kind of neighborhood bosses. They post posters at night to say, if you cooperate with the foreign forces, you know, we're watching you, so, intimidation tactics and kind of a shadow government that they're actually said to be running within Kandahar City.

And, so, the goal of many — many reports are speculating that the emphasis of part of the surge of troops will be to actually ring Kandahar, not unlike the Baghdad surge operation in 2007 in Iraq, and actually to saturate the area around Kandahar with a number of troops to kind of cut off Kandahar from being infiltrated by the Taliban.