Prepare for TET 2009...

[cwcwmack]

not exactly but close...

With the Spring thaw and recent resurgence expect a nasty counterattack in Afghanistan in April-June...

Asia Times Article:

It has become a rite of spring during the last three decades in Afghanistan. After months of cold weather, the spring thaw makes it possible for militants to leave their winter shelters and travel off road along remote mountain paths to carry out guerrilla attacks.

In recent years, NATO and U.S. military officials have referred to the increase of militant violence that comes with the warmer weather as a “Taliban spring offensive.”

But the spring fighting has never been an offensive in the conventional military sense of the word. Rather, it has been a surge in guerrilla violence — waves of suicide attacks, roadside bombings, and even assassinations of Kabul-appointed judges or local administrators.

Tim Ripley, a military analyst and correspondent for “Jane’s Defense Weekly,” said that past spring offensives have meant increased mobility for Taliban fighters to move supplies and fighters across the border from Pakistan. That allows fighters based in Afghanistan to re-arm and intensify their operations against NATO, U.S., and Afghan government forces.

Although NATO officials are no longer referring to a “spring offensive,” Ripley says the intensification of fighting in the region has already begun, with attacks on NATO supply routes that link Pakistan’s port city of Karachi with bases in Afghanistan. Those attacks, he said, are “linked to the movement of the insurgency and intensification of the insurgency in North West Frontier Province.”