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Originally Posted by ZenGum
Hiya Bruce ... interesting, some responses.
Being ambushed is not what I had in mind by "finding the enemy". Finding the ones we want at time when we have the advantage is the trick. I also note you describe how hard it is to tell enemy from neutral later on; you seem to refute yourself.
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Being ambushed is the
only way to find the enemy, when they're everywhere, and you can't tell who in hell they are unless they're shooting at you.
You obviously don't understand, this is unlike normal warfare, where you find out where the enemy is based and attack them with an advantageous plan. Insurgency is a very different animal. In Iraq we made no progress until we became the big dog in the neighborhood, we could protect the population, only then they started helping us to ferret out the bad guys. We can't even begin to do that in Afghanistan, we can hardly protect our own.
I suggest you read Mike Yon's dispatches,
here and
here, of the day to day operations
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Limited bombing... a long slow admission of pinpricks will piss someone off, especially if they are already disposed to resent you as a foreigner. Do you seriously think the Afghans wouldn't mind having their country (or territory, or area, whatever) bombed or otherwise struck at?
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The only way the Afghans will know there's bombing, is if it's close enough to hear it. There's virtually no media, except in the cities. Most of the population is in isolated pockets, and they're pragmatic.
They can't tell the difference between the current coalition soldiers and the Russians. Many don't know the Russians ever left, and never saw them, only heard about them, when they were there.
They are more concerned with survival, food on the table now, and through the coming brutal winter. They're concerned about their animals and their crops, and the ones that grow opium are concerned about anyone fucking with their income, which equates with winter survival.
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Howdy TW:
The thing that struck me in your post was the goal "to go after" Bin Laden (etc).
Going after them means we are always a few steps behind, playing catch-up as they recruit new suicide fodder.
The only way to defeat the taliban is to cut off their supply of recruits by shutting down their religious schools (Madrassas) and replacing them with reasonably good quality secular schools. But the taliban know this and violently resist modern education, so this approach wont work without extensive (international) security to protect all schools for a generation, and that is about as likely to happen as the run-off election producing an effective and honest government.
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Schools? We ain't got no schools. We don't need no stinking schools. You're confusing Afghanistan with Pakistan.