AFGHANISTAN: 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 in 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 spokesman Maj 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 UK chief of defence staff, described Britain's military intervention in southern Afghanistan as "cuckoo".
Lord 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 said.
The weekend's high death toll was impossible to confirm, and the Taliban have angrily contested previous Nato claims. Maj Whyte said he was confident of the figure.
"The impact of a 500lb (230kg) 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 yesterday a roadside bomb killed one Nato soldier and wounded eight others and three Afghan civilians, the alliance said.
Nato's reliance on withering but indiscriminate air strikes has drawn criticism from Afghan officials and human rights organisations for causing civilian deaths.