Three years ago the Taliban operated in squad sized units. Last year they operated in company sized units (100+ men). This year the Taliban are operating in battalion-sized units (400+ men). So reported Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey (Ret), professor of International Affairs at West Point, after his second trip to Afghanistan to assess the balance of forces.
The former drug czar in the Clinton Administration and commander of the 24th Infantry Division in the Gulf War, McCaffrey concluded that in the past three years, Taliban has reconstituted the obscurantist movement that took Afghanistan back to the Middle Ages in the 1990s. “They are brutalizing the population,” said the general’s written report, “and they are now conducting a summer-fall campaign to knock NATO out of the war, capture the provincial capital of Kandahar, isolate the Americans, stop the developing Afghan educational system, stop the liberation of women, and penetrate the new police force and Afghan National Army.”
McCaffrey didn’t mince words about Pakistan’s links with Taliban: “Their base areas in Pakistan are secure.” Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf hotly denies what is undeniable. But McCaffrey counters, “Pakistan is an active sanctuary for the Taliban and is struggling against the ‘Talibanization’ of their side of the frontier… Pakistani madrassas (Koranic schools) continue to get the very bright sons of the Afghan rural areas because of poverty and lack of a proper Afghan educational system.”
Neo-Cons, the Pentagon and the NSA have what they wanted all along. A central on-the-ground base in Iraq from which to operate throughout the Middle East.
Is there a chance of Democrats and “moderate” Republicans diverging from this policy? And what happens to Afghanistan and Afghanis?
I percieve a huge culteral difference. Americans want to wrap up the Afghanistan war and get out. Afghanis and, especially, the Taliban think this is just getting started. It took them a decade to defeat the Soviets and that was fast for them.
I perceive that taking troops from Afghanistan for Iraq was a mistake. I also think the boast that “bin Laden can run but he can’t hide” was a bit more ambitious then it appeared at the time.
All those big guns, satellites, fancy electronic, and supersonic airplanes that cost hundreds of billions of dollars, can’t dig the Taliban and al Qaeda out of their holes.
Actually, any numbers from ‘a former drug czar’ are ones I take with a large grain of salt.
However, as for the Taliban once again handling the ‘government’ of Afghanistan, that was predictable when Iraq started.
J/P=?