I keep hearing about how the Taleban fighters are so well adapted to the arid wasteland they’re trying to defend. One report suggests they could stay squirrled away in their mountain caves for 6 months or more, while we continue turn large boulders into small ones with our million-dollar bombs.
But how can it be possible to live in a hole in the ground for more than a few days, maybe a week or two unless you had a huge supply of rations & potable water in there with you?
I humbly sumbit for your consideration, the fact sheet from the last AIDS Ride I participated in.
And that was just for four days.
I might also mention, for those of you who have never had the job of moving pallets of water jugs around, that it requires a forklift because each individual gallon weighs 8½ pounds. If we use the tired old figure of 64 oz. of water per day being necessary to maintain good health, each cave-dweller needs to put away 30 pounds of water per week. Much more if he is fighting in battle or enduring harsh weather.
Do you think the 6 month figure is realistic? I think that if we can keep them pinned in their caves for a few weeks, dehydration, malnutrition & unsanitary conditions will do more damage than most of our bombs are doing.
By their very nature – cavities in stone that have been dissolved away by slightly acidic ground water – many caves have running or springfed water. And, FWIU, over the centuries, the Afgan farmers/herders/whatever have dug many hidden well-holes (my term) down to the watertable in otherwise inhospitable mountain regions.
Also, caves are amazingly comfortable, temperaturewise, when it is freezing (or blazing) outside.
So, all in all, not a terrible way to spend the winter. Except when a Bunker-Buster comes aknockin’ at your door, I guess.
In WW2, on an island, the name of which I embarrassedly forget, the Japanese lived for months in caves, holding off American troops. They also had dug extensive tunnels to hide in. Military rations are compact and can be stored easily in bulk and many caves have water in them. We had to go virtually from cave to cave in WW2 to dig them out.
I think the OP answered the OP… “unless you had a huge supply of rations & potable water in there with you?” Obvioulsy you can’t live in a plain ol’ garden variety cave for very long, so you bring supplies in beforehand.
I suppose that if one never got out into the sun, and didn’t have nice vitamin D-supplemented milk, they might get vitamin D deficiency, but I think that that would probably take a good while.
Some of these caves, especially those that have underground running water, are so deep that the cave dwellers wouldn’t even know that a Bunker-buster was at the door.
The impression I got from the local Sunday paper, which had diagrams of some of these hidden tunnels and an explanation, was that these tunnels were originally dug as underground irrigation tunnels. Most were in various stages of going dry etc. Many had been enlarged by Bin Laden’s people (Bin Laden’s previous specialty was civil engineering IIRC). Some were large enough to drive large vehicles through. Even if we’re talking about you’re garden variety cave many probably have at least some access to local water. After that it’s just a matter of getting food down there.
Sort of like trying to get cockroaches out of the walls and cabinets no? Theoretically you could just leave the lights on and wait around until they starve to death from not coming out to get “supplies”. Um, no - it doesn’t seem to work that way. These dudes didn’t just run up into the hills for the first time ever starting a few weeks ago. They’ve been living and fightng from caves for decades, and have all kinds of supply chains and methodes of making it work. For a lot of them, scampering around the mountains and caves is the only way of life they’ve ever known - so they are good at it and could remain up there for years until someone gets into their network, or the entire landscape is bulldozed.
I thought I heard on the news even before we went over there that the “caves” in question were actually fortified underground bomb shelters constructed by the CIA when we were backing them against the Russians. I can’t quote a source, though. Has anyone else heard anything like that?
It’s probably worth bearing in mind OBL comes from a $Billion a year construction company and had (up to) 9 years of building time during the Afghan-USSR war before even planning for this little adventure.
One imagines these particular ‘caves’ are to (our understanding of) caves what Fort Bragg is to Injun fighting.