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Taliban commander captured as NATO raids intensify
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Taliban commander captured as NATO raids intensify
By KAY JOHNSON,Associated Press Writer -
Friday, July 9
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KABUL, Afghanistan – International and Afghan troops captured a Taliban commander responsible for bringing Pakistani militants across the border to launch attacks, the alliance said Friday as U.S.-led forces ratchet up their pursuit of insurgent leaders.
The coalition is touting a string of successes in capturing or killing dozens of key militant leaders since April, but so far it has not managed to reduce violent insurgent attacks across the country.
Last month was the most deadly of the nearly 9-year-old war for international troops, with 130 foreign forces killed.
President Barack Obama has sent 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan to carry out the war's counterinsurgency strategy, which focuses on securing the Afghan population and reversing Taliban gains.
While international forces patrol new areas to try to protect the population, their comrades in special forces, working with elite Afghan commandos, have been staging raids almost every night trying to weaken the insurgents' operational capacity.
On Tuesday, coalition and Afghan special forces arrested a Taliban commander in the eastern province of Nangarhar, NATO said Friday.
The alliance said the man _ whom it would not identify for security reasons _ facilitated a recent influx of operatives for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani militia accused in the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks and suspected in a string of more recent attacks in Afghanistan.
"Capturing this commander degrades the Taliban's operational and facilitation capabilities," said Col. William Maxwell, the director of the NATO-led international forces' Combined Joint Operations.
Joint Afghan-international raids have led to the arrest of more than 100 Taliban figures since April, NATO says. In the past two weeks alone, at least 23 mid- and senior-level insurgent leaders and 217 lower-level fighters have been captured or killed, it says.
"We've stepped up operations over the last six months," said NATO spokesman Col. Wayne Shanks. "What this is, is directly targeting the insurgent network, their leadership, their facilitators who bring in either weapons, supplies, money, resources."
However, capturing and killing large numbers of militants has yet to translate into reducing the violence that has been spiraling in Afghanistan, with suicide attacks and roadside bombs exploding across the country.
The Afghan Taliban has taunted the U.S. for its failure to stop attacks, saying in a message posted Thursday on its website that the U.S. faces "the most catastrophic military setback in its history" in Afghanistan and comparing the fight to the Vietnam War.
Shanks said the effect of the capture operations may take time to show up, and stressed that capturing insurgents must be combined with the foreign and Afghan forces increasing security to win over the support of residents.
"It's a double-pronged approach," Shanks said. "When you combine them into a comprehensive approach, you will start to see a shifting of the momentum and following that there will be a reduction in the violence."
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