The Taliban, on the other hand, has been much more successful than al Qaeda. For one thing, the Taliban have remote areas where they are actually in control of things. That's why the Al Qaeda High Command still has a few people who have not been captured. But you have a hard time running things from a remote mountain village. What really makes the Taliban an attractive investment, for wealthy fans of Islamic terrorism, is their prospects of gaining control over even more territory in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Moreover, the Taliban have access to over a hundred thousand pro-Taliban Pushtun tribesmen on both sides of the border. Several thousand of these are currently on the payroll, to raise as much hell as they can before Autumn (when these gunmen go off the clock).
They live and so are a threat. I just want to know if we learned nothing from our Afghanistan campaign. The Taliban let the Northern Alliance live even though it was shoved into a corner of Afghanistan where it was seemingly isolated and short of supplies. But with the addition of our support, this "defeated" faction drove the Taliban from power in short order in 2001.
Don't let the Taliban live on. I'm just not sure how we go after them given Pakistan's instability. (And Iraq has not distracted us from wiping the Taliban out--who really thinks we'd send 100,000+ troops into Afghansitan to poke around in Pakistan's tribal areas adjacent to Afghanistan?)
But I am absolutely sure that letting an enemy survive by definition gives them the chance to return. The Taliban have survived so far. We must find a way to kill their leadership and scatter their surviving foot soldiers back to their villages. And all without destabilizing a nuclear Pakistan.
Lovely decade we're having, eh?
