The way I see it, most western particpants are sick of Afghanistan. The Dutch have announced a pullout, and the Germans are making noises as well. The Karzai government has been shown to be corrupt and incompetent-the US is currently casting about for a successor.
All of this reminds me of the US in Vietnam, in 1968. The Vietcong had decided that the time was ripe to stage an uprising-and there were well coordinated attacks upon the US and SV troops-one group even came close to capturing the US embassy. The attacks were beaten off, but Tet marked a turning point in the war-for the first time, the Washington geeks seriously began to consider a pullout.
The question is: are the Taliban well organized enough to pull off something similar? Also, should the Afghan Army (which we have been training for 8 years) prove ineffective, would this be enough to cause Obama to throw in the towel?
The Viet Cong got the shit kicked out of them to pull off Tet…it was a horrible military defeat for them. True, it was a political victory, but I’m not seeing how the Taliban would want to repeat the tactics that basically took the VC out of the war for the remainder as a real military force. The thing is, the Taliban are pretty much it, as far as the resistance goes…there is no North Afghanistan who can act as a nation state and come in when they get themselves wiped out. There also isn’t a Soviet Union or Communist China funneling billions of dollars and tons of military resources to them either.
My WAG is that they COULD do something similar, but that they almost certainly won’t do so. AFAICT, their current tactics seem to be successful enough for them to basically hold their own at least, and to be putting pressure on several of the Euro allies to be considering getting out. How long they can maintain that pressure is debatable, since I don’t know what their resupply situation is, or how the rains in Pakistan and Afghanistan are effecting their ability to continue to fight one way or the other.
-XT
The Taliban is not a single, cohesive unit, but a patchwork of mini-Talibans that are stitched together through a network of tribal alliances. The could pull off some big events, like a series of bombings in Kabul and around the country on the same day (especially if they get help from fighters coming from Iraq, where these types of events were common), but they couldn’t maintain that in the traditional sense of a military campaign. They might not need to though.
I was talking to an expert on Afghanistan once and he told me that the problem is that Afghanistan is ruled by a network of warlords who all want their territory to be about 50% bigger than it is now, but no one wants the whole thing; resulting in endless tribal warfare.
There’s the HIG.
I don’t believe that they constitute anything remotely like a ‘nation state’.
-XT
How much support can they get from…certain factions…in Pakistan?
Even if they all rallied together I don’t think there would be enough of them to risk open combat with coalition forces. I think they would get annihilated.
A Tet style offensive would be fantastic for the US. Put the majority of the Taliban into one attack, in a desert where we can use all of our technological advances. By the time it is done, the Taliban (like the Viet Cong) will no longer be a force of much influence.
The reason the Tet Offensive was so effective politically, is because it demonstrated to the American public that the military and civilian leadership were flat-out lying about the progress of the war. The enemy was defeated, we were winning hearts and minds, and it would all be over by Christmas. Except, that wasn’t true.
Nevermind that the Viet Cong got chewed to pieces by Tet. Chewing the Viet Cong to pieces didn’t end the war, did it? Instead it just moved the war to another phase, where we fought the North Korean army, rather than the VC. The reason Tet worked is that it demonstrated that the war wasn’t over, that our forces could win battles and pile up body counts, but still the war continued and continued.
So if the Talibs stage a major offensive, and get their asses kicked, and suddenly the roadside bombs and attacks stop, because the Talibs are now all dead, well, then great. If the Talibs stage a major offensive, get their asses kicked, but the roadside bombs and such keep on going, well, that demonstrates that kicking the asses of the Talibs doesn’t do much to improve the situation. And that shows that the belief that we just need to hang in there and pretty soon we’ll win and we can all go home is delusional.
Of course, the difference is that the US leadership isn’t trying to claim that the war is already won, that’s Obama wanted to send more troops, because the war wasn’t being won, remember?
Of course, the Talibs do have a safe haven and ally, which is Pakistan. Of course, officially Pakistan is on our side, and it’s only certain elements in Pakistan that support the Talibs. But again, if there’s a major enemy offensive, and we kick their ass, yet the situation doesn’t improve, what does that tell you?
That we need to kick more ass!
Seriously though, you have a point about a war like this and its parallels to Vietnam in the sense of endlessness that it carries with it. Still, Pakistan is going to be the key. If they (with our help and drone attacks, etc) somehow manage to gain control militarily of these tribal areas, someday the Taliban are going to run out of room, or be so isolated as to be sufficiently marginalized. I realize that with the terrain and local loyalties that this is the problem facing the whole deal.
Can it be punctuated by an Afghan army officer casually shooting a Talib in the head?
Only if the ‘Talib’ is a known spy, summarily executed because he just caused the deaths of a group of civilians…
I mainly agree with Lemur866, though perhaps not in the way he means it (and not about Pakistan being a parallel to either North Vietnam or to the Soviet Union/China and their roll in propping up and providing aid and material to the Viet Cong)…the psychology of the situation is completely different. Even under Bush et al we weren’t being told that we had already won and that we’d be coming home soon. I don’t think the American people have been substantially mislead as to the course or condition of the war in Afghanistan, so a large scale offensive by the Taliban wouldn’t have anything close to the impact on the US population as Tet did. The only real parallel is, as Algher and others have said, having the Taliban come out in the open would be a disaster for them…they would literally get wiped out. Hell, it would be MORE of a disaster for the Taliban than it was for the Viet Cong, considering the state of the art in weapons and technology today that the US and our allies in Afghanistan have.
-XT
You guys are missing the real difference, which is size.
The Taliban, inasmuch as we can define it as a cohesive organization, probably doesn’t have more than twenty-five thousand men altogether.
The Viet Cong, or more properly the NLF, which actually was a reasonably cohesive organization, committed 80,000 troops just to the Tet Offensive, and was supported by a major NVA offensive.
It’s doubtful the Taliban could launch an attack of a tenth the size. I’d also strongly suspect that the gap between Allied military capability in Afghanistan and Taliban ability is even wider than between American/Soutth Vietnamese and NLF capability, and that gap was pretty wide. Today’s Allied armies are all volunteer forces and are of exceptional quality.
Exactly. I seriously doubt they have even a tenth of the other resources that the Viet Cong had either (i.e. funding, support, training, etc).
-XT
No. But the Taliban are not “pretty much it, as far as the resistance goes” And if the Taliban were wiped out from a failed attempt at a Tet-style offensive, the HIG would move right in to fill the void. They don’t like NATO anymore than the Taliban do. Lucky for us, they hate each other too.
The North Korean Army?
Sunnavawhatthehell?
Next thing you know, you’ll have us fighting the Orcs. 
I thought the HIG (and their old buddies the HIK) were pretty much a spent force. My understanding is that they got a lot of foreign aid and talked a lot but never actually accomplished all that much against the Soviets. I thought most of their members ended up defecting to other more active groups.
Of course our army is considerably smaller too. They don’t need 80.000 troops.
They currently number in the low thousands and are active in at least a couple provinces. Most defected to other groups like you said, but most of those probably did so for the sake of survival and not necesarily a change of ideals or loyalty. There are even a couple dozen in the current administration, though they claim to have no loyalty to their old group.
“I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader.”
Source: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 1953-56 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Compnay, Inc., 1963), p. 372
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/vietnam/ddeho.htm
In North Vietnam the the vast majority of the Vietnamese supported the Communist government. In South Vietnam, at least a plurality supported the Communists. In Afghanistan the Taliban does not have nearly as much support. Also, it lacks leaders of the caliber of Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap.