From a link from Winds of Change we have the sight of the enemy breaking in Afghanistan:
"If the government will let us peacefully return to our villages and our children, we will come," he says. "We are tired living on the run in these snowy mountains."
His fellow tribesman, Sarwar Akhund, goes one step further: Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and terror kingpin Osama bin Laden, he charges, tricked followers like him into believing they were fighting a holy war against infidels, "when really they just wanted to consolidate their own seats of power." If allowed back into society, he pledges to "do whatever I can" to help kill or capture the fugitive leaders.
The two soldiers expressed views that intelligence circles across southern Afghanistan have been hearing for months. Many officials, military strategists, and diplomats here are increasingly optimistic that the Taliban are largely a spent force, made up in great parts by disillusioned, worn out foot soldiers like the Akhund tribesmen.
That's why President Hamid Karzai plans a general amnesty for Taliban rank and file as one of his first major initiatives since winning national elections in October and being inaugurated last week.
Mr. Karzai and his American backers hope the move will not only bring peace to great swaths of Afghanistan, but may even lead to the seizure of the high-value terror targets US troops are hunting across the country's south and east.
The Taliban were supposed to be empire killers with a two thousand year history of repelling foreigners. And now they are breaking. Of course, we declined to play the invader vs. Afghan people game that so many assumed we would execute (just how many troops should we have needed to pacify a country of 25 million?).
The Germans broke after their furious effort in the Battle of the Bulge begun in December 1944. The Iranians broke after Karbala V in the Iran-Iraq War during January 1987. The Taliban broke at some point and I'm not even sure when. But their inability to hinder the elections when they promised to do so was the flashing sign that the enemy had finally broken after years of resisting.
At some point, the enemy in Iraq will break, too. It will come suddenly. And after they break you will be hard pressed to find anyone even in the Sunni Triangle with a good word for the Baathists or Saddam.
I'm looking for the signs, but they will probably not be obvious until well after it happens. When the insurgents fail to do something that we expect them to do or that they promise to do, I'll have to ask why.
