Oh, the Taliban does send armed bands out in the countryside where they get smart bombed by our side. This piles up the body count for the year, but when the press puts out that number they almost always fail to mention that the vast majority of those casualties are the enemy.
So when we nab a top Taliban commander by arresting him, what does this tell you about how resurgent the enemy is?
In Kandahar city, police arrested Taliban commander Abdul Jabar, who served as deputy to captured militant leader Mullah Mansoor Dadullah, the interior ministry said.
The ministry described Jabar as the most senior Taliban commander after Dadullah, who was taken into custody in Pakistan in February.
"Mullah Abdul Jabar had a significant role in terrorist activities after Dadullah," it said in a statement.
Kandahar, the birthplace of the Islamic Taliban movement which was in power between 1996 and 2001, is one of the most troubled regions in southern Afghanistan, where the Taliban-led insurgency is intense.
Police arrested him in the birthplace of the Taliban? How resurgent can the enemy be when a top leader is nailed in their heartland by cops?
Recall that when the Taliban ran Afghanistan that the Northern Alliance manned a frontline to hold their ten percent of Afghan territory. These guys held actual ground. Yet nobody thought they were winning against the Taliban.
Today's enemy? They get arrested in their strongest territory. And are tagged "resurgent."
Whether it is Afghanistan or Basra or wherever, if an enemy raises their voice with bulging eyes to hammer home the point and issues some scary threat, our press believes the statement at face value and writes that our enemies are winning.
But hey, don't blame the poor babies in our press corps too much. They spent all their time in journalism school learning the finer points of semi-colons. Who had time to learn history and warfare?
