“What we are seeking to do is to make sure people are safe. That’s why we’ve gone out of our way to explain what we were trying to do and when we were going to do it,” Brigadier James Cowan, the commander of British Forces in Helmand, said yesterday.[...]
With his two-year-old son clasped to his chest, Haji Mohammed Manan said yesterday that he had walked eight hours through flooded opium fields with his wife and seven children to avoid the danger on the roads.
Afghan officials said that bombs and booby traps would slow the advance into Marjah and that the initial push could be expected to last about three weeks. Gulab Mangal, the governor of Helmand, has broadcast to people in the district advising them to stay away from Taleban positions if they cannot escape the area entirely.
And just where are those "positions", and do they have enough provisions to last them three weeks inside their homes?
Marjah was originally reclaimed from the desert by American engineers who built irrigation canals as part of an aid project in the 1950s. The terrain, accessed by narrow tracks and criss-crossed with deep ditches, is easy to defend and difficult to attack. One local journalist based in Lashkar Gah told The Times that a mood of pessimism and apprehension reigned among local people, despite Nato’s concerted effort in recent months to avoid civilian casualties.[...]“The proportion of people who think that the foreign forces are good is very small.”
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