But villagers said the insurgents, in keeping with their usual battlefield practice, did not attempt to mass and confront the superior firepower of arriving coalition forces. Instead, they sought cover in the region's lush fields once aerial bombardment began, then slipped away.
An Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman, Gen. Mohammed Zahir Azimi, said he thought many insurgents had fled under cover of darkness Wednesday night.
"The Taliban have just gone to other parts of Kandahar province," said Saadullah Khan, a tribal elder in Arghandab.
The Taliban incursion grew out of a demoralizing blow to the Afghan government: a well-organized attack on Kandahar's main prison.
About 900 prisoners escaped, many of them considered dangerous militants. Taliban commanders said their ranks were substantially bolstered by escapees.
Even though it did not last long, the Arghandab confrontation showed the havoc insurgents could readily inflict on civilians, even in an area barely half an hour's drive from the main coalition base in southern Afghanistan.
Panicked residents fled their farms as the fighting loomed. And departing militants seeded the area with mines, Afghan officials said, which could imperil the harvest of grapes, wheat and pomegranate that was to have begun within days.
From the time the Taliban arrived in Arghandab, statements by the coalition and Afghan authorities were somewhat embarrassingly out of sync, suggesting that the Afghans and their Western allies might not be fully sharing intelligence or conferring closely with each other.
Whereas NATO has superior technical means of intelligence-gathering, including aerial and electronic surveillance, the Afghan authorities generally hear more readily from local officials and village elders.
NATO initially said no significant numbers of residents were fleeing; Afghan officials reported an exodus numbering in the thousands. Eventually, the alliance acknowledged that about 700 families had taken shelter elsewhere, but said there was no humanitarian crisis.
On Tuesday, two days after the insurgents had moved in, the Afghan Defense Ministry said the Taliban force numbered about 400; NATO said that estimate was "greatly exaggerated," but never provided its own.
The Defense Ministry said more than 50 Taliban fighters were killed during the 24 hours beginning Wednesday morning.
Kandahar's governor put the total of killed and injured insurgents in the hundreds. NATO did not issue any tally.
