The Taliban had a bad year in 2009, although they managed to play the media well enough to hide a lot of their problems. The biggest defeat for the Taliban was in a continued loss of support by the Afghan people. Opinion surveys have had the percentage of Afghan approving the Taliban going downward for several years, and it's now under ten percent.
The Taliban operate in a narrow area of Afghanistan, alienate people even in their own strongholds, can't count on support from Pakistan as the Pakistanis hammer their own jihadis, and suffer from failing to goad our forces into killing civilians that the Taliban cling to as human shields.
The latter is especially significant, given the complaints about restrictive our rules of engagement, and bears quoting:
The Taliban are also having a problem with their use of human shields. Foreign troops are not taking the bait like they used to. Instead, the foreign troops wait out the Taliban, knowing that the irregular fighters will get nervous just being surrounded, and will make a break for it. Sometimes they do slip away at night, but often they are caught in the open, where a smart bomb or two can do its job without hurting any civilians. The troops are not crazy about the new tactics, but opinion polls show Afghans feeling they are safer at the end of the year, than at the beginning.
I've sympathized with our troops on this issue, it is unfair that we are blamed when the fault lies with the enemy that hides behind women and children. But as I've written, fairness doesn't enter into this. The objective is to win the war under the conditions we face, and not have a good kill ratio. We'd order troops to charge machine guns to win; and we can rightly order our troops to show restraint with firepower use to win. In the long run, that will reduce our casualties--and allow us to win.
But the Taliban continue to get good press coverage in the West, which portrays our enemy as being "resurgent." Don't believe our press. They will likely get facts right (broadly speaking), but their assumptions and analysis aren't very good. Even after eight years of war, they have not developed much understanding of history or war.
Our press corps never got the narrative right in Iraq, remember. Unless you think it makes perfect sense to have years of reports about our coming inevitable defeat only to be followed by military victory. I know some like to explain this by claiming Iraq was a fiasco only saved by a gamble, but I prefer to understand the situation as our press collectively being unable to find their own buttocks with both hands and a GPS device. Because of this, our military has to make our victory so obvious that even our press can see it.
We can win the war in Afghanistan. We need to pass a gut check as we see increased casualties this year, but if we don't defeat ourselves, the enemy will have a hard time beating us.
