The US military is waiting to see whether some Taliban leaders take a break during August for the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, crossing over the border into Pakistan after several weeks of high profile attacks.
Adm Mike Mullen, the top US military officer, appeared to reserve judgment however, acknowledging that it was hard to say what would happen in August which this year coincides almost exactly with the lunar month of Ramadan.
“There’s an awful lot of discussion about the Taliban leadership leaving their fighters here, and particularly to go back across the border for Ramadan,” he said, referring to talks he had with commanders in Kandahar and Helmand provinces.
A western official, speaking in the Afghan capital on condition of anonymity, said there was anecdotal evidence that some leaders had already left for Pakistan.
The official said that although the Taliban sought an increase in attacks during Ramadan, they appeared incapable of a nationwide surge in violence and predicted limited spikes in violence.
Adm Mullen said it was difficult to predict what would happen. “I have no idea whether violence or attacks will go up or down,” he said.
The military assessment about Taliban movements follows high-profile attacks and assassinations that have shaken southern Afghanistan. The strikes have been particularly acute in Kandahar province, the Taliban’s birthplace.
A suicide bomber killed the mayor of Kandahar on Wednesday, compounding fears of a dangerous power vacuum in Afghanistan’s south in the wake of the assassination of President Hamid Karzai’s half-brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai.
Adm Mullen acknowledged a degree of political instability because of the assassinations but said US commanders had not reported a deterioration in day-to-day security in Kandahar. “At least from the commanders’ standpoint, they haven’t seen that,” said the admiral, who flew into Kandahar on Friday.
Adm Mullen, on what may be his last trip to Afghanistan before stepping down at the end of September, has been upbeat about battlefield progress and the ability of the US military to maintain its momentum, even as it carries out a withdrawal ordered by US president Barack Obama last month.
President Obama’s decision to withdraw 33,000 of the nearly 100,000 US forces in Afghanistan by the end of next summer was a faster timetable than Adm Mullen had recommended. The goal is to hand over the main security responsibility to Afghan forces by the end of 2014. “I’m very confident we can meet the needs on the ground as well as the deadlines and the goals that have been laid out by the president,” he said.
The new US commander in Afghanistan, marine corps Gen John Allen, is still drawing up plans for the drawdown of the first 10,000 troops by the end of the year, a small number of which pulled out earlier this month. Adm Mullen said Gen Allen had until mid-October to come up with that plan. The US military chief renewed his concerns about corruption and a lack of governance in parts of Afghanistan.
“We know that some agencies and institutions vital to transition are infiltrated and subverted by criminal patronage networks,” he said. “I have been briefed, for example, on local officials who want kickbacks on certain development projects.”
US military commanders he had met expressed a “very stark view” of corruption, Adm Mullen said, but added that the US was working to stop its own practices that helped fuel the corruption.
“We recognise that our inattention, especially with respect to contracting and procurement, has contributed to these problems, and we have undertaken . . . a range of new reforms.”