Kandahar

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - Although it is just beginning, the U.S.-led effort to pacify the Taliban's spiritual capital in southern Afghanistan already appears to be faltering. Key military operations have been delayed until the fall, efforts to improve local government are having little effect and a Taliban assassination campaign has brought a sense of dread to Kandahar's dusty streets. NATO officials once spoke of demonstrating major progress by mid-August, but U.S. commanders now say the turning point may not be reached until November, and perhaps later.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Amid a spike in Afghan and American deaths in southern Afghanistan, U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top NATO commander in the country, conceded Thursday that the military push to secure the Taliban's spiritual capital would take longer than anticipated. A series of obstacles has slowed the opening stages of the highly anticipated summer offensive to defeat Islamic extremists and bolster the Afghan government in Kandahar province. A Taliban intimidation campaign has undermined the American-led effort to build a functional Kandahar government.

Until lately, Kandahar was a Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan. The place name is also the title of a scorching movie odyssey, Kandahar, Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf's lyrical lament to disembodiment, exile, and the day-to-day terror of war. In the opening passage of this surreal dirge, prosthetic legs rain from the skies over Afghanistan, replacement parts parachuting down from Red Cross planes to aid thousands who have lost...

American ground forces entered the fighting in Afghanistan yesterday, as a company of about 200 Army Rangers staged a nighttime paratroop attack on the Kandahar airfield in southern Afghanistan. A senior administration official said the hit-and-run raid was intended partly to demonstrate that American forces can attack at will, even in the heart of the Taliban regime. Kandahar is the base of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar. After the raid, the Pentagon reported that a U.S. helicopter supporting the commandos crashed in neighboring Pakistan, killing two people in the first combat-related American deaths of the military campaign.

The bodies of five Marines killed last week when their plane crashed in Pakistan were recovered yesterday as search efforts continued at the mountainous site for two others who were aboard. To the sad strains of "Amazing Grace," 100 of their comrades gathered in Kandahar to pay tribute to the victims of the single deadliest incident for Americans so far in the war in Afghanistan. The deaths will "strengthen our resolve to do everything we can to eradicate terrorism in the world," Marine chaplain Joseph Scordo told troops assembled at the U.S. base, their M-16 assault rifles and rocket launchers pointed downward.

If the mountains outside the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar are any guide, American soldiers searching the al-Qaeda caves in Tora Bora for clues to Osama bin Laden's whereabouts face a dizzying challenge, fraught with peril. A network of caves and hideouts laces the barren mountains north of Kandahar. They are filled with weapons and ammunition that al-Qaeda fighters left as they fled in anticipation of American air strikes and the advance of anti-Taliban forces. Just finding all of the caves has been a challenge for American and allied soldiers.

Opposition troops said they were fighting the Taliban on the outskirts of Kandahar, the militant regime's last stronghold and - based on a new report last night - the possible refuge of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. A senior official of the opposition Northern Alliance said that bin Laden and his protector, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, were hiding together in or near Kandahar, the southern city that is Omar's home and the Taliban's spiritual center. "Yes, they are still alive," said Abdullah, the Northern Alliance's foreign minister.

It was 4 a.m. Saturday in Kandahar the last time Pfc. John Kihm talked to his mother on the phone. Deployed to the war in Afghanistan in March, Kihm wanted her to know that he had the date for his forthcoming R&R. He would be home for 15 days, starting July 8. He loved the Phillies, said his mother, Cecelia, on the phone Wednesday from the family's home in the Castor Gardens section of Northeast Philadelphia. So, she told him, she would try to get five tickets so the whole family could catch a ball game.

Obstacles arose on the military, diplomatic and humanitarian fronts in Afghanistan yesterday as the attack on Kandahar stalled, talks on a new government deadlocked, and food shipments to a million people were blocked by anarchy. The setbacks suggested that the easiest phase of the war on terrorism may be over and that, to achieve its goals, the United States might have to deepen its involvement in the notoriously knotty internal affairs of Afghanistan. "Ironically, as the size of the Taliban real estate diminishes, the danger to coalition forces may actually be increasing," said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN - A suicide bombing that killed the mayor of Afghanistan's second-largest city yesterday is the latest in a rash of high-level assassinations that have cast doubts over whether security gains in the Taliban's southern heartland will survive the drawdown of U.S. "surge" troops. Kandahar Mayor Ghulam Haider Hamidi, who was a U.S. citizen, died in his heavily guarded compound when a man detonated explosives hidden in his turban as Hamidi accepted petitions from tribal elders, officials said.

KABUL, Afghanistan - A helicopter crashed in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, killing one member of the U.S.-led coalition and injuring another in what was the second deadly air crash in the country in a week, NATO officials said. The crashes come as U.S. officials are grappling with tough talk from Afghan President Hamid Karzai, whose recent anti-American rhetoric has complicated relations at a time when international troops are withdrawing from the war. Capt. Luca Carniel, a spokesman for the coalition, said that there was no enemy activity in the area when the helicopter went down and that the cause of the crash was being investigated.

KABUL, Afghanistan - U.S. commanders are offering glowing reviews of their 2012 war campaign, upbeat assessments that could be interpreted as leeway for President Obama to order another round of troop withdrawals this summer. Obama faces tension between calls by Democrats and even some Republicans to wind down the war more quickly and the military's desire to avoid a too-fast pullout that might squander hard-won sacrifices. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta has not yet recommended to Obama a specific pace of withdrawals for 2013.

The what-might-have-beens about Afghanistan are already starting, even though there are still about 90,000 U.S. troops there.   U.S. forces will draw down to 68,000 by September and will shift from a combat to an advisory role in 2013; most American troops are due to return home by the end of 2014. Yet, despite the loss of almost 2,000 U.S. soldiers in an effort to stabilize the country, the Afghan future remains murky. A Taliban comeback is quite possible. So it's worth reading a new book, out last week, by senior Washington Post correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran, called Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan, to get a sobering look at what went wrong.

Afghan violence leaves scores dead KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - Scores of Afghans were killed Wednesday in Taliban attacks and other violence including a NATO air strike, highlighting persistent instability as foreign troops begin their drawdown. Two U.S. pilots were killed when their helicopter crashed in Ghazni province, a senior U.S. defense official said. The deadliest assault took place in the southern city of Kandahar, where three suicide bombers turned a dusty marketplace into a gruesome scene.

CHICAGO - NATO leaders on Monday adopted President Obama's exit strategy from the nearly 11-year-old U.S.-led intervention in Afghanistan, cementing an "irreversible" pullout of foreign combat troops that will leave Afghan security forces with the leading role in combat operations by the summer of 2013. "We are now unified to responsibly wind down the war in Afghanistan," Obama declared at a news conference at the close of the two-day summit in his hometown, while acknowledging that serious risks persist.

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN - The American soldier accused of shooting 16 Afghan villagers in a pre-dawn killing spree was flown out of Afghanistan yesterday to an undisclosed location, even as many Afghans called for him to face justice in their country. Afghan government officials did not immediately respond to calls for comment on the late-night announcement. The U.S. military said the transfer did not preclude the possibility of trying the case in Afghanistan, and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has said the soldier could receive capital punishment if convicted.

On a flawless, spring-like morning this week, President Obama stood in the Rose Garden to urge against a hasty retreat from Afghanistan. "We have a strategy that will allow us to responsibly wind down this war," he said, resisting calls for a quick exit prompted by the slaying of Afghan civilians by a rogue American soldier. A few minutes after Obama spoke those words, I crossed the Potomac to visit with some of those who have come home under circumstances nobody wanted.

NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE PANJWAI, Afghanistan - Militants riding motorcycles attacked a high-level Afghan government delegation during a memorial service Tuesday in the village where a U.S. soldier is said to have killed 16 people, mostly children and women, in a door-to-door rampage two days earlier. The Tuesday assault, on a mosque in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province, left at least one Afghan soldier dead and punctured the calm that had largely prevailed in Afghanistan since the massacre.

The weekend massacre of Afghan civilians, allegedly carried out by a U.S. soldier, newly undermines the rationale for a war that a majority of Americans already thought wasn't worth fighting. But the Obama administration and its allies insisted yesterday that the horrific episode would not hasten plans to pull out foreign forces. President Obama called the episode "tragic," and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called it "inexplicable. " Obama told a television interviewer yesterday that the killings underscore the need to hand over responsibility for security to Afghans.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - The soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians, most of them children, and burning their bodies was trained as a sniper and recently suffered a head injury in Iraq, U.S. officials said Monday. The name of the suspect, a married, 38-year-old father of two, has not been released. Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta said that he may face capital charges and that the United States must resist pressure from Washington and Kabul to change course in Afghanistan because of anti-American outrage over the shooting.