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Get Nasty or Go Home
By Michael Scheuer. Take with a grain of salt.
Rather than popular support for the Taliban being based on intimidation and money, what we are seeing in Afghanistan is popular opinion catching up with Islamist determination. Until roughly late 2006, the war against the U.S.-NATO coalition was largely fought by the Taliban, other Islamists groups like that led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and al Qaeda. Since then, however, the Islamists have been joined by Afghans who simply do not want Muslim Afghanistan occupied by all sorts of infidels from all sorts of Christian and polytheist countries. In short, an Islamist insurgency has evolved into an Islamist-nationalist freedom struggle not unlike that which beat the Red Army. The best way to see the growth of the Afghan enemy facing the United States and NATO is to track the proliferating number of insurgent attacks in the heretofore quiet and supposedly "friendly" arc of provinces from Herat in the west clockwise to Badakhshan in the far northeast. . . .

. . . [L]et us hope . . . that Washington's focus is refixed on the hard but simple Afghan choice it faces: Because the U.S.-NATO occupation powers the Afghan insurgency and international Muslim support for it, we must either destroy it root and branch or leave. . . . . [O]nly the all-out use of large, conventional U.S. military forces can be expected to have a shot at winning in Afghanistan. Since 1996, the United States has definitively proven that clandestine operations, covert action, Special Forces actions, and aerial drone attacks cannot defeat al Qaeda. It has likewise proven beyond doubt that nation-building in Afghanistan is a fool's errand.

That said, military victory would require 400,000 to 500,000 additional troops, the wide use of land mines (even if Princess Diana spins in her grave), and the killing of the enemy and its civilian supporters in the numbers needed to make them admit the game is not worth the candle. This clearly is not a viable option. . . .
The man spent his career in the CIA, in the end targetting Osama bin Laden and not being permitted to do anything about it during Bill Clinton's tenure. Is he more qualified than I to design military strategy?

I also wonder how much the behaviour of the Afghans is due to Strong Horse thinking rather than love of the jihadis who are stealing their sons and daughters and using them as human shields? But that is not going to change so long as they are left to the tender mercies of the jihadis when we pull back.

Posted by: Maggie Ebbuter2991 2009-10-16
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=281144