Afghanistan: From Bad to Worse in the North?
Friday, September 17, 2010 at 8:14
Anna Badkhen writes for Foreign Policy:
I returned to Northern Afghanistan in April to document for Foreign Policy the implacable spread of the Taliban in the region (the dispatches I wrote were recently published as an ebook, Waiting for the Taliban); I left the region in May. At the time, the Taliban were terrorizing travelers in Kunduz and Baghlan provinces, along the main route that NATO uses to bring in supplies from Tajikistan; launching swift attacks on government forces in Takhar Province; and flagging down traffic at impromptu checkpoints on the ancient roads of Balkh.
How to measure the progress of the war since my visit? Violence has been metastasizing across the north. A string of bombings in Kunduz killed at least 19 Afghan police officers in the last five weeks. Last month, 10 Western aid workers, members of a medical team, were slaughtered in Badakhshan -- the remote redoubt of the legendary Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, where the Taliban did not dare venture even when they were ruling most of the country from Kabul. It was the largest massacre of relief workers in Afghanistan in years. The United Nations, which last winter considered parts of the north volatile, now regards a large swath of the region as extremely dangerous for its personnel.