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Afghanistan
The Taliban Are Too Weak for a Tet Offensive
2012-04-18
by Max Boot.
A taste. If clicking on the headline doesn't work for you, googling the title should get a working link -- the Wall Street Journal has an agreement with Google.
The Tet Offensive it wasn't. On Sunday, insurgents belonging to the Haqqani network attacked seven high-profile sites in Kabul and other parts of Afghanistan. The Afghan National Security Forces responded swiftly and professionally with minimal assistance from NATO. Far more insurgents wound up dying (36) than members of the security forces (11). Life in the capital has already returned to normal. When I was there a few weeks ago, I saw a thriving city where the biggest daily concerns are traffic jams and air pollution—not insurgent attacks.

The failure of this insurgent assault bodes well for Afghanistan's future—and runs counter to the doom-and-gloom in the U.S. The Taliban, Haqqanis and associated insurgents continue to enjoy safe havens in Pakistan, but the only way they will shoot their way back into power is if we abandon the vast majority of Afghans who have no desire to be ruled by ignorant, medieval tyrants.

Mr. Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of "Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present," out next January by Norton.
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#6  Many Americans expected a "Korea"-styled outcome to Vietnam, hence were shocked when the 1968 Tet Offensive proved it wasn't, espec after Cronkite announced on-air how the US had lost the war.

During Korea, the US had clear Nuclear Dominance over both Red China + post-1945, still Stalinist USSR - by 1968, espec after the Cuban Missle Crisis + rise of Leonid Brezhnev, the US advantage was seriously reduced.
Posted by: JosephMendiola   2012-04-18 20:40  

#5  Thanks for the excerpt, whoever you are, anonymous poster. Next time, probably better to post a link to Google where the first search result is the article. Thanks!

'Twas I, gromky. For some reason, sometimes my nym doesn't get attached when I post an article. But come now, you can't highlight, copy and past the article title into a Google search box? Even I can do that, and I'm one of the legendary end users who can't program the DVR.
Posted by: trailing wife   2012-04-18 19:37  

#4  But the US et al are already a lot closer to admitting it's not worth it than they were at Tet, when much/most of the country still backed the war. That said, this effort was not sufficient to even move the needle (the constant drip, drip, drip of IEDs and insider attacks are much more effective.)
Posted by: Glenmore   2012-04-18 19:02  

#3  Just like the real Tet, they don't need to be strong, just need to be strong enough to make us believe/understand the price of victory is more than it's worth to us.

The real Tet involved 300K to 600K Vietcong and NVA regulars. It was about four orders of magnitude (10,000 times) larger than this offensive. By the end of the Tet offensive, we had lost about 4K dead GI's.
Posted by: Zhang Fei   2012-04-18 17:41  

#2  Just like the real Tet, they don't need to be strong, just need to be strong enough to make us believe/understand the price of victory is more than it's worth to us.
Posted by: Glenmore   2012-04-18 17:16  

#1  Thanks for the excerpt, whoever you are, anonymous poster. Next time, probably better to post a link to Google where the first search result is the article. Thanks!
Posted by: gromky   2012-04-18 16:05  

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