The Taliban staged a number of attacks over an 18 hour period, but nearly all of them failed, mostly because of the efforts of Afghan police and soldiers. By Monday morning, 36 Taliban, eight soldiers and three civilians were dead in three cities. There was a lot of noise, but none of the Taliban attack teams reached their objectives. The Taliban knew that the Western media would be late in noticing that the attacks were largely failures and allow the Taliban to get away with declaring victory. President Karzai got caught up with all this and quickly accused NATO intelligence of failing to detect these attacks ahead of time. But when the dust had settled, it was obvious that the effort was another Taliban failure, this time mainly at the hands of Afghan security forces. This made the defeat even more painful, because the Afghans are not leaving after 2014.
Not even the Taliban are ignorant enough to think they won. But there are still plenty of people here whose vast knowledge of military matters leads them to declare we are losing the war and had best cut our losses and get out sooner rather than later.
Don't listen to those fools.
