U.S. STRIKES HELP BREAK IMPASSE AND RESTORE POWER TO KABUL

[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.]

 

By David Jolly

The head of the United States delegation, David E. Lindwall,

left, with Salahuddin Rabbani, Afghanistan’s foreign minister,

during the fourth round of four-way peace talks at the

presidential palace in Kabul on Tuesday.

Credit Shah Marai/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

KABUL, Afghanistan — United States airstrikes have helped to break a bloody impasse between Afghan troops and Taliban militants north of Kabul, allowing repair crews to reach downed power lines and restore electricity to the capital after more than three weeks of disruption, an Afghan official said on Tuesday.

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.

@ The New York Times