Yea, kinda unusual for any story that begins with “villagers rebel” to end well for the villagers. But hopefully this will be an exception.
The trend the past three years has gone in favor of the villagers. And I am saying trend.
The trend is what must be paid attention to, to see that there are signs of progress for the ISAF coalition and for the people of Afghanistan.
There has been and there will be major eruptions of violence as the Taliban continue to unleash their fury at the civilized world, by taking it out on Afghan security forces and police when they can, but mostly they are now killing their fellow Afghans and that is fellow Muslims.
The significance of this is where this particular eruption is taking place.
More from the original cited report:
The military strategy that was put into effect shortly after Obama took over as Commander in Chief was counter-insurgency with a plan to clear, hold and build with a very strong emphasis on the ‘clear’ part to wipe out Taliban leadership with night raids, and with doing as little harm to ‘villagers’ as possible.
The ‘clear’ part is over in most of Afhanistan.
The** ‘hold’ **part was based around training the Afghans themselves to be in the lead. That has pretty much gone on as planned and as scheduled, with of course set backs and tragedy along the way with about 70 incidents of green on blue attacks. But the green on blue attacks must be viewed as a matter of US and our coalition troop’s lives saved because over 300,000 Afghans are in the lead in patrols and raids and other security operations.
Taliban fighters have given up during the past few years, and a website put out by NATO/ ISAF issues reports that have consistently reported the capturing and killing for the past two years, at least a few to about ten Taliban leaders and commanders each and every week. (I have never totaled up an average but the reporting has been steady and consistent as the recent ones indicate.
They have recently begun to taper off, which could be an indication that captured or killed commanders and weapons and IED facilitators are not being replenished or replaced.
I’ve put together a the reports from
http://www.isaf.nato.int/article/isaf-releases/51.html
of kills and captures that have taken place that last month or two…
The villagers have the numbers. The highest estimate I have ever seen of the number of Taliban fighters and leaders was 40,000.
The population of Afghanistan around 30,000,000.
Afghan military and police forces have grown from less than 100,000 in 2008 to approaching 400,000.
When the villagers can see that the national government’s security forces and police have been ridding the countryside of Taliban leaders and IED planters, they will rise up as they did in this report and drive the Taliban out of their midst.
The fighters will likely surrender.
And the Leaders who survive and escape may go hide in the lawless regions of Pakistan, but they will for a long time be wondiing when a hellfire missile come crashing through their mud and rock terrorist hut and kill them.
This is not over by any means, and Afghanistan will not become a paradice anytime soon. This is a brutal conflict where civilians end up the worst of it.
But the trend is not leading to a return of the Taliban ever again. And that was the goal of the US Military and diplomatic mission in Afghanistan.
And we’re taking this at face value, from the force that has just declared 'victory, without any on the ground or independent reportage?
Is it possible there’s a little wishful projection on the part of those who so badly want to believe?
We’re about to leave, so the warlord musical chairs game is heating up. Whether they are Taliban or not is much less relevant than ethnic and personal connections.
What’s going on does not map to our concepts. It’s both a longer game (decades long cycles of vendetta) and shorter (the fortunes of local exploitation, changing by the day).
Marketing.
Not according to The Department of Defense
Hamid Karzai under fire on Afghan women’s rights
This place has yet to hold a non-fraudulent ‘election’.
You don’t get to redefine our ‘goals’ or the definition of ‘victory’ to mean ‘whatever things look like when we cut and run’.
“This happens all the time.” was the first response by Tagos. It is a report. And the report is undated, and is about whether the many uprisings of the past meant that the Afghan Central Government would be supported as a result.
There is no information in what Tagos cited that disputes the original post of this thread.
They acknowledge that all prior uprisings had never jelled into a national movement.
The significance of the uprising that I cited is the location.
It is in the stomping grounds of Mullah Omar.
The other significance is that if this uprising holds, and the villagers, and the Afghan Police Chief keeps the Taliban at bay as fewer and fewer foriegn troops remain on Afghan soil,
then the Taliban has evidently been weakened enough to hold elections in 12 months, and the people can vote for new leadership in Afghanistan.
That is what the ISAF coalition have been driving for…
Get to that election with foreign troops out of the frontlines and in a support role.
Tagos repeats a simplistic one-sided view of the events taking place in the former Taliban stronghold and the birthplace of the Taliban movement twenty years ago.
But I’ve come to see how Tagos operates.
Can you explain how this debate is different from the last debate you started-- the one we all gave up on a few days ago?
I’d have to call it a tremendous setback; I thought Victory had already been declared. Or perhaps you meant a different V word had been used by a US general with regards to Afghanistan, but I hardly think calling the situation in Afghanistan “vagina” is appropriate.
I operate in the real world. You operate in the one where there is the possibility free and fair elections in Afghanistan and the police aren’t just the kiddie-raping bandit allies of whatever local strongman is shaking down the area.
The colour of the sky in my world is blue.
General Allen was clear in saying ‘this is what victory looks like’ to Afghans, that are willing to fight, and that certainly do not need to be told that some 37 year Afghan scholar in the USA and by others with no physicsl skin in the game, that their cause is lost and something way fewer than 40,000 Taliban cannot be beaten by ten million, so you might as well go find a Taliban Commander and kiss his arse, and submit to whatever that Taliban scum tells them to do.
General Allen did not declare victory as done after WWII.
There will never be a formal declaration of victory in a COIN operation. You’ve set up a straw man based upon an inapplicable definition of victory and are proud to be knocking him down.
Read what he said, in context and for what purpose:
I’m not seeing the difference either. I’ve merged the threads.
Tagos posted the following and I have several questions I’d like to ask about the point Tagos tried to make with it, but this post #006 from the thread “Afghan villagers rebel against Taliban means what” was lost in the merge to this thread.
I fear this won’t end at all.
US, NATO and all the ISAF forces are seeing the transition to end happening right now. There is no use remaining in denial of it.
There is never going to be a day when Victory will be declared.
But it certainly is possible to imagine, because of thinks we are seeing, the Afghans themselves, overcoming the generations of war and violence and oppression that has dominated Afghan’s lives for centuries.
It won’t happen at the end of 2014, perhaps not completely before 2024, but if Afghans, such as the villagers that are rising up against the Taliban, as is the case in the Taliban’s heartland, then the ‘trend’ is heading in the direction in favor of the good people of Afghanistan, not for the rotten and evil ones.
You need to seek information from all sources but not listen only to the naysayers.
The naysayers are losing ground with the Taliban and al Qaeda in the part of the world. Slowley, but steadily.
You appear to be testing the boundary fence between optimism and fantasy with some vigour.
How so?
I have not wished away the serious problems, dangers and issues the Afghans yet face.
Every single optimistic condition I bring up is based upon current reality on the ground in Afghanistan and in the lawless regions of Pakistan, and no one here has advised that the conditions presented have come from
flawed or unreliable sources.
Causes for optimism:
Despite about 70 deadly Green on Blue attacks there are now close to 400,000 Afghans enrolled and trained into the Afghan National Government and Police Services. There effectively taking the lead in nearly all of the most populated areas of Afghanistan.
An uprising agaist the Taliban in a province known as a long time Taliban stronghold has occurred and has the potential to hold and spread to other areas. Many previous uprisings in other parts of the country the past couple years are holding, as foreign troops withdraw.
There are nearly 3,000,000 girls attending school, in defiance if Taliban law against it. in 2001 there were only a handful of girls attending school.
The Taliban are not able to attack foreign troops with their weapon of choice as much as before. IED, or improvised roadside explosive devices are way down - to five killed coalition troop’s this year. Surveillance technology has contributed in part to this reduction.
There’s more but you should get the point that the naysayers are the ones cherry picking the negatives and fantasizing that only a bad and disastrous outcome will be the destiny for thirty million Afghans because of the brutish and cruel power that something less than 40,000 Taliban have over the lives of the war weary Afghans and the publics from all the nations that have given it a go at making things better inna long troubled part of the world.
It seems we could at least focus equally on the fantasies of the doom and gloomers that there are no indications coming from the war zone to justify even a touch of optimism after all that has been fought and sacrificed.
Recall what brought the Taliban into power in the first place: resistance to a corrupt, hated government propped up by a foreign power.
You’re posing a binary outcome here: either a stable, legitimate, democratic government under Karzai or his successor; or a return to Taliban rule. Why should those be the only outcomes in play? Afghanistan could return to tribal or warlord rule, or brutish anarchy, or any number of outcomes.
A “touch” of optimism is all there is, sadly.
If you read what I have posted, I recognize what the ISAF coalition has evolved toward. The idea of hybrid governance.
That’s what you’re so optimistic about? Best case scenario, then, is a weak central government that lasts a decade or two, until one warlord or another, or a faction of them, feel like they’re getting a raw deal and overthrow it.