KABUL, AFGHANISTAN — When the Taliban seized a string of villages outside one of Afghanistan's largest cities this week, NATO-led forces moved fast, airlifting in hundreds of Afghan and Western soldiers and sending warplanes and attack helicopters into the skies.
In less than 48 hours, they had driven out the insurgents.
Afghan authorities declared Thursday that the brief Taliban incursion near the southern city of Kandahar had been successfully repelled. But the incident illustrated the ease with which even a handful of militants can tie up large numbers of coalition troops and heavy weaponry deployed to counter what NATO repeatedly described as a not particularly serious threat.
The short-lived confrontation in the Arghandab district also showed how thoroughly the insurgents could disrupt the daily lives of villagers in a nominally secure area, and raised concerns of worrisomely flawed communication between Afghan forces and their Western allies.
Moreover, officials acknowledged that the insurgents would probably regroup elsewhere in the area and remain a threat, with the warm summer months traditionally a time when Taliban fighters step up attacks on Western forces.
After moving into nearly a dozen villages in the Arghandab area on Sunday, Taliban commanders said they would use it as a springboard for attacks on Kandahar, the nation's second-largest city and their former power base.
Arghandab is a prime gateway to Kandahar, 10 miles away. The farming area has good roads and plenty of cover for fighters among its wheat fields, pomegranate groves and vineyards.
North Atlantic Treaty Organization officials have insisted that Kandahar, whose security is considered pivotal to the entire south, was never under any real threat. But the alliance put troops on high alert to counter the Taliban threat of suicide bombings.
NATO said its troops, mostly Canadians, did not encounter any significant concentration of Taliban fighters as they backed up Afghan troops in the Arghandab operation. Alliance officials repeatedly questioned Taliban claims that hundreds of fighters had surged into the district.
"No large formation of insurgents were met or spotted; only minor incidents occurred," Brig. Gen. Carlos Branco, the spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, told journalists in Kabul, the Afghan capital, on Thursday.
