Hopes for a winter lull in fighting in southern Afghanistan were halted by a weekend firefight in Uruzgan province in which Nato said it killed 70 suspected militants.
The battle erupted on Saturday afternoon in the remote Chora valley when up to 150 Taliban fighters attacked a joint Afghan-Nato patrol. Mostly Dutch and Australian soldiers are deployed to Uruzgan, a lawless province where the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Omar, has close family ties.
Over the following four hours Nato helicopters and warplanes pounded Taliban positions, leaving 70 insurgents dead, said spokesperson Major Dominic Whyte.
After a summer of blistering fighting in Helmand, where the ferocity of combat forced a British withdrawal from some remote outposts, the scale of the battle suggests the Taliban are regrouping in Uruzgan, whose jagged mountains have traditionally provided sanctuary during Afghanistan’s harsh winter.
The weekend battle came as Lord Guthrie, a former chief of defence staff, described Britain’s military intervention in southern Afghanistan as ”cuckoo”. Guthrie had been a strong supporter of Britain’s role in Afghanistan and Iraq and the prime minister’s foreign policy.
”Anyone who thought this was going to be a picnic in Afghanistan — anyone who had read any history, anyone who knew the Afghans, or had seen the terrain, anyone who had thought about the Taliban resurgence, anyone who understood what was going on across the border in Baluchistan and Waziristan — to launch the British army in with the numbers there are, while we’re still going in Iraq, is cuckoo,” Lord Guthrie told the Observer.
The weekend’s high death toll was impossible to confirm and the Taliban have angrily contested previous Nato claims. Whyte said he was confident of the figure. ”The impact of a 500lb bomb on human flesh isn’t particularly nice so there’s always going to be a margin of error,” he said.
There are signs that the Taliban do not intend to slow the fighting this year. Elsewhere in Uruzgan on Sunday a roadside bomb killed one Nato soldier and wounded eight others and three Afghan civilians, the alliance said. The nationalities of the Nato casualties were not disclosed.
Nato’s reliance on withering but undiscriminating air strikes has drawn criticism from Afghan officials and human rights organisations for causing civilian deaths. Nato’s top commander, American General James Jones, apologised on Saturday for fighting in Kandahar last week that Afghan officials claimed caused 60 civilian deaths but which Nato put at 12. An inquiry is due to report this week.
Human Rights Watch called on Nato to establish a unified compensation fund for victims and their families. At present each Nato country operates a separate compensation policy. – Guardian Unlimited Â