Over the last three years, the Taliban have desperately sought a way to deal with the foreign troops that hunt them throughout southern Afghanistan. Their traditional forms of combat (assault rifles, RPGs, rockets) have proved generally useless against the better trained, led and equipped foreign troops, particularly the combat experienced Americans. Thus the Taliban have developed tactics that depend on avoiding contact with foreign troops, and concentrated instead on using IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices, roadside and suicide bombs). In the first two months of this year, two thirds of the 48 foreign troops killed, were victims of IEDs. But the Taliban are still losing 15-20 men for every foreign soldier killed. The Taliban have had to raise the pay of their fighters, to $300 or more a month, and they are finding fewer takers. Even those paid to place roadside bombs suffer casualties, because the U.S. developed tactics for detecting those placing the bombs. That usually results in the bomb emplacers getting captured or, more likely, killed.
Ultimately, IEDs are chosen as a primary weapon out of weakness and not strength. So stop acting like the Taliban are about to kick our asses. You look like an idiot when you do (For God's sake, why is "open ended war" bad? Isn't that just "fighting until we win?" Isn't fighting for three years--and no more--simple idiocy?).
Man up and fight the war and we'll be fine:
“DONT worry, we are not going to lose this war.”
These were the parting words to us from Brig. Gen. Sher Muhammad Zazai, commander of the 205th Corps of the Afghan National Army in Kandahar. He was echoing the sentiments of a group of village elders we had met days before in Khost Province, who assured us that they would never allow the Taliban to come back.
It is odd that the Afghans felt it necessary to reassure American visitors that all was far from lost. It reflected the fact that even in a country where electricity and running water are scarce, word of the defeatist hysteria now gripping some in the American political elite has spread.
No one in Afghanistan — from the American commander, Gen. David McKiernan, to those village elders — underestimates the difficulties that lie ahead. But no one we spoke to on an eight-day journey (arranged for us by Gen. David Petraeus, the head of the military’s Central Command) that took us from Kunar Province on the Pakistan border to Farah Province near the Iranian frontier doubted that we can succeed, or that we must do so.
I remain skeptical that we need so many more troops. And I think we need patience more than we need more troops. I also worry about the fate of those troops we'll send--seven to ten combat brigades plus supporting units--given our tenuous supply lines to Afghanistan.
But we must win the war. And we can win as long as we don't attempt too little by thinking air strikes from afar will work without the intelligence that boots on the ground provide us, or do too much by thinking we can create a modern unified state in Afghanistan with just a little more combat force and another team of advisors to discuss modern sewage treatment theory.
I swear, too many over here are ready to figuratively roll to their M-4 and blow their figurative brains out right now, without even waiting for the enemy to defeat us.
