Afghan forces battled hundreds of Taliban fighters for a fifth day in the west of the country on Friday, as insurgent offensives challenged claims the rebels are ineffective in conventional clashes. ...
"The Taliban are fighting Afghan forces in large numbers. We estimate there are about 700 Taliban in the attacking force with 50 4x4 vehicles in Bakwa and Gulistan districts," Maolavi Yahya, the district chief of neighboring Delaram, told Reuters.
I wondered why the Taliban were massing and attacking:
After the Taliban spring offensive has fizzled, pretend conquests of towns failed to provide an image of victory, and locals forced by the Taliban to claim NATO indiscriminate attacks on civilians failed to halt NATO firepower, the Taliban seem to be willing to expend lives in a desperate attempt to defeat a NATO outpost.
Some have claimed the larger death toll shows we are losing and the Taliban are "resurgent."
This article explains that I'm not imagining things:
Along with the rise in Taliban--and to some extent, al Qaeda violence--has come a sharp increase in the number of insurgents killed by Coalition (mostly American and Australian) troops and Afghan security forces. The Afghan diplomat said about 3,500 Taliban have been killed this year, and several top commanders captured.
There's been a major tactical shift recently in how the Taliban insurgency attacks Coalition forces. Of course, IEDs and suicide bombings are up 20 percent over last year's 5,388 total, but there have also been a number of large-scale engagements waged against allied patrols that wind up resulting in high enemy losses. It seems anathema to the usual tactics of an insurgency, where small hit-and-run attacks prove most effective at driving government forces and their allies out of the fight. And it speaks to a growing trend of military incompetence within a Taliban depleted of its experienced, native-born fighters. ...
So, why the sudden wave of mass attacks? A lot has been made in recent news reports of the increase in foreign fighters joining the ranks of the Taliban, with some of those stories insinuating that the development is a measure of the insurgency's growing strength and influence. The New York Times reported on October 29 that the foreign fighters "are not only bolstering the ranks of the insurgency. They are more violent, uncontrollable and extreme than their locally bred allies."
But a top American commander based in Kandahar--where the Taliban movement was born--explained that from his perspective the foreign fighter influx is actually a sign of weakness. The high body count is a result of "ineptitude" he said, and stems from the fighters' lack of experience and training.
"In this type of war, when you mass against forces like us . . . without firepower, we're able to destroy them quite easily and we've shown that over the last six to seven months," said Col. Thomas McGrath, the American commander in charge of training Afghan security forces near Kandahar. "They're bringing in cohorts of young men who really don't know any better and it's been a colossal failure for them."
With Pakistan remaining a sanctuary for the enemy, enemy forces can continue to gather and then enter Afghanistan to fight. Fortunately for us, these enemies are tactical idiots. They mass and then we kill them in large numbers. I'd rather they didn't come, but as long as they insist, I'm glad they bunch up to make it easier to kill them.
As the first quoted paragraph notes, it is almost as if the Taliban are insulted by claims they can't fight in direct combat. And by using SUVs to move about, they are making themselves more vulnerable to our smart bombs.
It is a strange war when the enemy dies in larger numbers and the fact that this is a higher level of deaths leads some to conclude we are losing.
