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U.S. plans big Afghan offensive with allies

CAMP LEATHERNECK, Afghanistan - U.S. troops and their Afghan and NATO allies are planning their biggest joint offensive since the Afghan war's start, targeting a town in the south known as a Taliban stronghold and a hub of its lucrative opium trade, officers said yesterday.

CAMP LEATHERNECK, Afghanistan - U.S. troops and their Afghan and NATO allies are planning their biggest joint offensive since the Afghan war's start, targeting a town in the south known as a Taliban stronghold and a hub of its lucrative opium trade, officers said yesterday.

For security reasons, no date for the start of the offensive has been released. But U.S. commanders have said they plan to capture the town of Marjah, 380 miles southwest of Kabul, this winter.

It is to be the first major offensive since President Obama ordered 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, and many of the Marines set to participate arrived as part of the surge.

Up to 125,000 people are believed to live in the district around Marjah, an agricultural center in Helmand province surrounded by a maze of irrigation canals built with American aid in the 1950s and 1960s. About 80,000 people live in or near the town.

From 600 to 1,000 Taliban and foreign fighters are thought to operate in the area, U.S. officers say. NATO officials won't say how many NATO and Afghan troops have been earmarked for the offensive, but they are expected to vastly outnumber the Taliban and its allies.

In Kabul, a NATO spokesman, Brig. Gen. Eric Tremblay, told reporters the operation would include at least 1,000 Afghan police and thousands of Afghan soldiers as well as thousands of NATO troops. U.S. officers say the offensive will involve the highest number of Afghan forces in any joint operation to date.

An Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman, Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi, did not specifically mention Marjah but told reporters in Kabul that a large operation was coming "in the near future" in Helmand. He said it would "separate the local people from the terrorists in the area."

Fighting escalated in Helmand in 2006, and the sprawling southern province was transformed into one of the deadliest parts of the country for NATO forces.

Last spring, thousands of U.S. Marines arrived in the province to reinforce the British military. British and U.S. forces launched twin operations to try to stabilize the area before the August presidential election, in which turnout in Helmand was extremely low.

U.S. officials have spoken publicly about plans to take Marjah in hopes that many civilians will leave the town, along with Taliban fighters who are not deeply committed to the insurgency.

Commanders believe support of the local population is crucial to establishing an Afghan administration as quickly as possible and to help NATO troops detect the numerous improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, that they expect to face in Marjah. Two U.S. service members were killed by a bomb Tuesday.

Col. George Amland, deputy commander of Marines in Helmand province, said the Taliban force included "hundreds of idiots running around Marjah right now waiting to aggregate" and confront the NATO and Afghan troops. He said he expected the Taliban ranks to "dwindle very quickly into a very manageable number" by the time the fighting begins.

Amland dismissed most of the Taliban force, saying that local opium poppy growers and opium dealers would abandon the extremists quickly. That leaves the "dyed-in-the-wool Taliban," Amland said. He estimated that there were "a couple of hundred of those."

The extremists are believed to include about 100 to 150 foreign fighters, including Arabs, Pakistanis, Uzbeks, Chechens, and a few Yemenis, said Maj. Jundish Jang Baz, of the Afghan army.

Afghan Maj. Jundish Jang Baz said the problem was that NATO was not completely sure whether it could rely on all the forces supposed to be on its side. Jang Baz said the locally hired Afghan police were less than reliable.

"We think they're working with al-Qaeda in Marjah," he said, adding that he expected the Taliban to "scatter like ants."

"The real challenge is to make sure they don't flee with enough weapons to start another fight somewhere else," he said.