By Nicholas Kulish

German soldiers go over a map of the area at a temporary camp they set up on the desert in Kunduz Province, Afghanistan, during a two-day patrol along an area known for Taliban activity.

TOBRAKASH, Afghanistan – Tall Germans bearing rifles, their faces red from the harsh Afghan sun, their beards and stubble caked with the fine dust of the desert road, asked a group of four men with a tiny roadside bicycle repair shop in this village some 17 miles north of Kunduz if they had seen any Taliban recently.

“Two days ago, on motorcycles, with AK-47s, their faces masked,” the eldest of the four men, with a long white beard, answered without hesitation through a translator. When had he last seen the Afghan army? He thought for a moment, looking a bit perplexed, before saying, “sometime in the spring.”
Traveling with the German military on a three-day, 125-mile patrol in Fox and Dingo armored vehicles from their base near Kunduz up to the Tajik border, it quickly became clear how thinly stretched both Afghan and coalition forces are in the once-peaceful region of northern Afghanistan.

That’s particularly true in the area around Kunduz, where the fighting has intensified most dramatically this year. But the lion’s share of any equipment and most freshly trained recruits end up going to the even more violent southern part of the country.

According to the German military, the regional command north, which they head, has just 6,000 NATO soldiers, 8,000 members of the Afghan National Army and 12,000 members of the Afghan National Police, trying to control an area of more than 60,000 square miles, or roughly half the size of Germany, with 11 million inhabitants.

By contrast, New York City’s 305 square miles and 8 million residents, (where, incidentally, there is no insurgency and no mountain range) has roughly 34,000 officers keeping the peace.

So inhabitants in places like Tobrakash often end up with next-to-no contact with either NATO soldiers or their own government, and more frequent visits by the Taliban.

The commander of the German infantry unit conducting the patrol, Capt. Volker S., who, according to German military rules, could not be fully identified, said he thought another German force had been in the vicinity about a month earlier, but wasn’t sure. He said they had to focus on the district of Chahar Darreh, just to the southeast of the city of Kunduz, where the insurgency is particularly fierce.

“You have to clean up the front yard before you go to the neighbor’s,” the captain said. And in a sign of where things are headed, their home is getting a substantial addition. The brick-walled German base in Kunduz was built to house roughly 500 soldiers and is now home to around 1,000 at any given time. Construction crews are already at work expanding the base to the west, with plans to roughly double its size.

Comments (0)

Print

Tell friend

Top

---