The Taliban Information War has also gotten the Western media to buy into the fiction that the Pushtun terror organization is a lot larger and more powerful than it actually is. The Taliban are actually a terrorist group with the support of a minority of the Pushtuns (mostly in southern Afghanistan), who are in turn a minority (40 percent) of the Afghan population. Most Afghans, including most Pushtuns, hate the Taliban, and were fighting them even before September 11, 2001. The Taliban thrive because they allied themselves with the drug gangs, who have grown rich producing heroin and opium. The majority of Afghans want nothing to do with the drug business, which is why most of the stuff is produced in Taliban Central; Helmand province. For the majority of Afghans, the Taliban and their drug producing allies are a plague upon the land, and the sooner they are destroyed, the better.
I remain nervous about our supply lines, but that's a separate issue of what we can do on the battlefield. Time and again during the Iraq War I cautioned war supporters against "taking the gloves off" and using as much firepower as we needed to defeat the enemy. This, I argued, was fantasy. Only genocide could deliver "victory" with this method, and we'd turn our honorable military personnel into nothing but killers and thugs in the process to achieve that so-called victory. We won the Iraq War without "taking the gloves off."
So now, despite problems with our rules of engagement that limit our use of firepower even more than in Iraq (because Afghans--justly or not, it is irrelevant-- are more sensitive than Iraqis to civilian casualties), we should not "unleash" our firepower on the Taliban in the mistaken notion that we are losing and need to reverse our downward momentum by doing what we do best--pound enemies.
Lavish use of firepower didn't work for the Soviets who were willing to attempt genocide to pacify Afghanistan--so it sure won't work for us. We simply won't kill enough to cow the population. We'll just use enough violence to create more enemies from anger than we kill, who will then kill more Americans than we save with increased use of firepower. It would be "penny wise but pound foolish."
We really aren't facing a triumphant and advancing Taliban with our limits on using our firepower. Pass those gut checks when you read about some firefight where a bunch of well placed bombs could have saved some American or allied lives, and remember that in the long run we'll suffer fewer casualties--and more importantly, win--than we would with liberal ROE.
Don't run hither and yon, advocating different strategies for every tactical setback we face. Work the problems, keep our eye on the real objective, and win the war. Only we can beat ourselves.
