[To break the impasse, American
aircraft began striking Taliban positions in the Dand-e-Ghori area of Baghlan Province , north of Kabul , driving the insurgents away,
said Col. Abdul Rashid Bashir, the provincial deputy police chief. A spokesman
for the United States military in Afghanistan,
Col. Michael T. Lawhorn, said he had no information about American airstrikes
in the area.]
The transmission lines
connecting Kabul to hydroelectric generators in Uzbekistan were first cut on Jan. 27, depriving the capital of its most important supply of
electricity. The government accused the Taliban of destroying pylons that support the
cables, though the militants denied doing so.
What was not in doubt was that the repair crews could not reach
the area because of mines, booby traps and fighting between the Taliban and a
large Afghan National Army force that was sent last month to reclaim the area
from insurgent control.
To
break the impasse, American aircraft began striking Taliban positions in the
Dand-e-Ghori area of Baghlan Province , north of Kabul , driving the insurgents away,
said Col. Abdul Rashid Bashir, the provincial deputy police chief. A spokesman
for the United States military in Afghanistan,
Col. Michael T. Lawhorn, said he had no information about American airstrikes
in the area.
Power to Kabul and other affected regions was
restored late Monday.
The supply of electricity to the capital by Afghanistan’s
national power company, known as DABS, is never enough to meet demand, even at
the best of times. But the loss of the Uzbek lines, and a separate attack that
cut the electrical supply from Tajikistan , had left much of the capital
without power through
several winter weeks.
The United States ’ action ensured that the
lights were on in Kabul in time for a meeting on Tuesday of a four-nation
group that is working to restart the Afghan peace process. The so-called
Quadrilateral Coordination Group, made up of diplomats from Afghanistan,
Pakistan, China and the United States, issued a statement after the discussions inviting the
Taliban and other antigovernment groups to meet with representatives of
President Ashraf Ghani in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, by the first week
of March.
Requests for comment from a Taliban spokesman were not immediately
answered.
Mr. Ghani has sought to negotiate a way out of the conflict, but
he has little to show for his efforts. He was humiliated last year when, just
days after what had seemed to be a breakthrough meeting between Taliban
delegates and Afghan government envoys in Pakistan, officials announced that
the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar,
had died more than two years earlier.
In addition to costing Mr.
Ghani significant political support at home, the revelation exposed deep
differences within the Taliban over whether to support peace talks. It also led
some commanders to break away completely, which could complicate the new peace
effort.
The pace of the antigovernment
violence has, if anything, intensified. Afghan forces have been on the defensive for months in the opium-growing
heartland of southern Helmand Province .
The insurgents have also maintained a high pace of random
mayhem. On Monday, a Taliban suicide bomber targeted an Afghan Local Police
unit in the Seya Gerd district of Parwan Province, killing 14 people, including
six police officers, and wounding 11, said Wahid Sediqy, a provincial police
spokesman.
Davood Moradian, director general of the Afghan Institute for
Strategic Studies and an adviser to former President Hamid Karzai, expressed
pessimism that anything would come of the talks, saying that China and the United States had pressed Pakistan and Afghanistan to talk with the insurgents,
but that “they won’t deliver on substance.”
Also on Tuesday, the United Nations criticized a raid last week by Afghan
security forces, said to have been accompanied by American advisers
or other international forces, on a hospital in Wardak Province run by the Swedish Committee
for Afghanistan . According to the United
Nations and the Swedish aid group, the Afghan troops detained two patients and
a 15-year-old boy and summarily executed them.
The aid group condemned the
raid as against the Geneva Conventions. And in its statement, the
United Nations called on “all parties to the conflict in Afghanistan of their obligation to always
respect the provision of health care, never to harm medical personnel and
patients, and to ensure that the protected status of medical facilities is
respected.”
Jawad
Sukhanyar contributed reporting.