Since then each year has been bloodier; every spring NATO commanders plan an offensive to stop the Taliban's spring offensive, and every autumn they count more bodies and cry out for reinforcements.
Along with Afghanistan's own forces, it is preparing "Operation Nowrouz" (new year), a spring offensive to disrupt the Taliban's spring offensive.
By February 2006, Mr. Neumann had come to the conclusion that the Taliban were planning a spring offensive, and he sent a cable to his superiors.
The attacks followed a Taliban announcement earlier this month of a spring offensive - Operation Al-Fatah or Victory - which would target Nato forces, foreign diplomats, contractors and Afghan government officials.
He plans to outline a variety of economic proposals in a spring offensive under the new banner "Jobs First".
Taliban fighters used guns, rockets and suicide bombers in what a spokesman for the group called "a spring offensive" designed to demonstrate its strength, though Nato dismissed the violence as "largely ineffective", leaving Afghan security forces to deal with it.
Dadullah boasted in an interview this year that he had deployed 6,000 fighters for a spring offensive and that suicide bombers had infiltrated every major Afghan city.
In a tacit admission that the protests will be difficult to sustain over the winter, organisers are now focusing their efforts on planning a "spring offensive" with fresh targets, they told the Guardian in a series of interviews this week.
The insurgent group, which has long refused to recognize the Kabul government and said it would not deal with Afghan concerns until U.S. forces leave the country, finally agreed to meet informally with a group of Afghans, despite the Taliban announcement of a spring offensive.
Today: the Taliban launches what it says is a spring offensive to 'cleanse' the country, the Mexican army kills a founder of the Zetas drug cartel, at least 15 people are killed in a soccer game stampede in the D.R. Congo, and Israeli politicians ask that Jewish settlers who carry out hate crimes are classified as terrorists.
Yet it is also clear that the Taliban promise of a "spring offensive" was no bluff.
