U.S. AIR STRIKES RISE IN SOUTH AFGHANISTAN

'Opportunist' Taliban Making Moves To Grab Power, Says American Military

Washington -- As fighting in Afghanistan has intensified over the
past three months, the U.S. military has conducted 340 air strikes
there, more than twice the 160 carried out in the much higher-profile
war in Iraq, according to data from the Central Command, the U.S.
military headquarters for the Middle East.

The air strikes appear to have increased in recent days as the United
States and its allies have launched counteroffensives against the
Taliban in the south and southeast, strafing and bombing a stronghold
in Uruzgan province and pounding an area near Khost with 500-pound bombs.

U.S. officials say the activity is a response to the increasingly
aggressive Taliban, whose leaders realize that long-term trends are
against them as the power of the Afghan central government grows.

"I think the Taliban realize they have a window to act," Army Maj.
Gen. Benjamin Freakley, commander of the 22,000 U.S. troops in the
country, said in a recent interview. "The enemy is working against a
window that he knows is closing."

But some experts believe that the Taliban, the fundamentalist Muslim
party ousted by the U.S. invasion in 2001, have sensed an opening in
the south as the central government in Kabul has failed to gain much
influence there and as the United States prepares to transfer command to NATO.

"I think it is an attempt by the Taliban to pre-empt the changeover
from coalition to NATO command," said Barnett Rubin, a political
scientist at New York University. "They are trying to show that there
is a war in the south and that the British, Dutch, Canadian or any
other forces will have to take casualties and fight, not just patrol
and build schools. They hope that this will have an impact on
internal politics in these countries."

The arrival of late spring, historically the beginning of
Afghanistan's fighting season, usually brings an increase in combat.
Since early May, a resurgent Taliban militia has launched numerous
attacks in southern Afghanistan in which more than 300 insurgents,
soldiers and civilians have died. It has attacked in larger numbers
and more frequently, burning 200 schools in the south and driving out
foreign aid groups. Suicide bombings, a tactic relatively new to
Afghanistan, have also increased.

Commanders say the combat is more intense than in the past three
springs, both on the ground and from the air. The offensive has
coincided with an effort to wipe out opium poppy crops in the south,
resulting in an alliance between wealthy drug traders and
anti-government Taliban forces. Anti-government fighters are moving
in where the government has left a vacuum, especially where there is
money to be made from drug trafficking and extortion.

"The Taliban are opportunists," said John Stuart Blackton, a retired
U.S. diplomat who consults on Afghan issues with the National
Intelligence Council, which produces government intelligence
forecasts. "They have no deep ideology and no deep theory that
informs what they are doing. ... In other words, they are better
understood as being like a crime family in New Jersey."

The air strikes between early March and late May concentrated on two
areas -- in the provinces of the south-central mountains that are the
Taliban's major redoubt and in eastern Afghanistan near the border
with Pakistan, where al Qaeda and its allies operate. But U.S.
warplanes have also hit targets near the capital of Kabul, the main
U.S. base at Bagram, and near other major cities such as Jalalabad
and Ghazni. The attacks have been executed by aircraft ranging from
large B-52 bombers to small Predator drones, and have employed
everything from 2,000-pound bombs to strafing attacks.

The U.S. military and its allies have started "going into areas that
haven't been gone into with a lot of forces," most notably, Freakley
said, in Konar province, north of Jalalabad.

"In general, I think our forces have been aggressive, and the
Taliban's been more aggressive this spring than in the past," Air
Force Maj. Gen. Allen Peck, deputy commander of the Central Command's
air component, said in a separate interview. Peck helps oversee a
two-war force that can fly from bases in the Persian Gulf region to
hit targets in either Afghanistan or Iraq.

The spate of recent civilian deaths caused by the U.S. bombing has
hurt the U.S. image in Afghanistan.

In late May, the Taliban occupied a village 20 miles from Kandahar
city, prompting some of the U.S. air strikes, including one that
killed at least 15 civilians. Afghan President Hamid Karzai called
for an investigation of the incident and asked the top U.S. military
commander in the country, Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, for an explanation.

"We go to great pains to limit any kind of casualties among the
civilian population," Freakley said.