As the Afghan and US-led coalition forces launched a massive operation in southern Afghanistan, a provincial governor claimed their forces had killed nine Taliban and arrested a dozen in different areas.| Hurray for our guys! |
| "Dis province is gettin' too hot for us, boyz! Load up! We're headin' for Kandahar!" |
| This is all part of the Taliban spring offensive. They had a press release the other day warning the Brits of what fearsome guerilla fighters they are, but they're just the same Pashtun dumbasses who're giving the Paks so much trouble in Waziristan. Individually they're tough guys, I suppose, but their tough guy "victories" are against poor souls they can kidnap, or against inanimate objects like schools, or against non-combatants like women and kiddies. In real military operations, against real soldiers, they consistently lose. The Afghan Taliban have ceased to be a problem in themselves. They're merely the extension of the Wazoo problem. Waziristan and Bajaur and parts of Balochistan are where the drivers live for the Taliban on both sides of the border. That makes it as much a problem in international relations as a military problem, so I expect that Afghanistan's problems will continue to grind on at about their present low level until the Pakistan problem's been taken care of, and I have no idea what form that will take at this point. I believe the Talibs (and their Arab masters) expect the same thing. They see the war against the Taliban as a replay of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, with themselves in the role of the mujaheddin and us in the role of the Russers. They expect a long war, with us taking economic hits and getting tied down in other places, which is why they're so hot on Iraq. Eventually we're supposed to go broke and go home and our government collapse, at which time they expect to go back to beating women with battery cables, enforcing their perverse interpretations of Koranic injunctions, and becoming part of the Caliphate, if not the very center of reborn Islamic glory. The difference is that we're not the Russers. We're not sending three or four divisions of draftees in to pacify the country; we're sending professionals who know what they're doing and do it well. The home front, for the most part, supports operations in Afghanistan, regardless of their opinion of Iraq. Just as importantly, the support network that was provided for the mujaheddin in the 1980s isn't there now. There's only a truncated stump. The ISI may want to run a war against us using Afghan proxies, but they've got to be very low key about it, otherwise we'll be down Perv's throat with both feet. Mullah Diesel (Fazl) is a politician now and there's only so much assistance his party can extend without us putting them on the list of terror organizations. Mullah Sandwich (Sami) was been rather skillfully put on the outs with the rest of the fundos. He's close to Haqqani, but he doesn't command the resources for big time support. Nizamuddin Shamzai is dead and his successors don't command the same influence. In Afghanistan, Rasool Sayyaf appears to be coopted by the Karzai government and maneuvered away from the main chance. The Soddy money pipe, while not totally closed off, at least now has a valve in it, so the cash isn't coming quite so fast. The only resource the Talibs really have is the supply of yokels willing to cross the border and kill infidels, who it turns out are better than them at killing people. The only real hope the Talibs and their Qaeda masters have is for regime change in Pakistan. Zawahiri harps on it regularly. That leaves us with Perv, who isn't going to shut the whole thing down for matters of Strategic Depth™, but who also isn't going to openly support it, and who faces the danger of seeing his Frankenstein's monster bust up his laboratory. |