Analysis: Will battle for Kandahar win war? - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times: "Since the war began, this southern city and surrounding countryside have been marked as the heartland of the Taliban, the insurgents’ springboard to retake all of Afghanistan. It has witnessed some of the bloodiest fighting.
Now, as U.S. and allied forces wrestle with urban warlords and take on die-hard insurgents in booby-trapped orchards and grape fields, the battle for Kandahar city is being described as the decisive campaign, a linchpin of American strategy to win the 9-year-old conflict.
“As goes Kandahar, so goes Afghanistan,” has almost become the military’s mantra.
Not all agree, arguing even if success in Kandahar is achieved, the war will be far from over. That success is far from guaranteed: the obstacles are overwhelming, the time to overcome them may prove too short, and victory may hinge not on what happens on the ground in Kandahar, but in the American political arena.
“This is Western military thinking which is totally irrelevant to Afghanistan,” says Marc Sageman, a former CIA operative in the region now with the Washington-based Foreign Policy Research Institute. “You can pacify Kandahar and you’ll still lose the war because Afghanistan remains a highly decentralized society, and in the countryside, the Kabul government has little legitimacy.”"
