By Dave Anderson:
Steve passed along the Reuters report last week that argued the Afghan government conceded that it was not in control of at least half of the country, and the vast majority of the south was either government no-go zones, or Taliban leaning. That map and analysis was dated for late April of this year before the summer campaign season truly took off. The summer campaign season has seen the addition of a US Marine brigade and sundry other Western reinforcements as well as a supposedly growing and maturing Afghan Army. One would assume that the combination of more troops and ISAF that has experience of learning by doing, things would be improving.
That is not the case, at least according to this new Reuters article
Afghanistan's south and east into the north and west, the commander of
U.S. and NATO troops in the country said in an interview published on
Monday.
"It's a very aggressive enemy right now," McChrystal told The Wall Street Journal newspaper (online.wsj.com/) in an interview in Kabul. "We've got to stop their momentum, stop their initiative. It's hard work."
So the Taliban has the initiative and the momentum on both a tactical level (as almost all guerrilla groups do) and on an operational level. They are pushing the pace of the battle and they are betting that their $300,000,000 operation can outlast a $50,000,000,000 annual operation due to their home court advantage. If the UK is talking about a forty year operation with twenty years of combat in that forty, this is a bet I would not take if I was the US.
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