Thursday, October 29, 2009

It's Called a "Siege"

Hot Air is reporting that it looks like the new Obama strategy in Afghanistan will be to cede the countryside to the Taliban and protect the cities.
At the moment, the administration is looking at protecting Kabul, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Herat, Jalalabad and a few other village clusters, officials said. The first of any new troops sent to Afghanistan would be assigned to Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual capital, seen as a center of gravity in pushing back insurgent advances ...

Military officers said that they would maintain pressure on insurgents in remote regions by using surveillance drones and reports from people in the field to find pockets of Taliban fighters and to guide attacks, in particular by Special Operations forces.
In plain English, this is called a "retreat" and the end result will be a "siege." As noted in the Hot Air piece, if the enemy controls the countryside, they will control the food supply. They left out one other piece, however. If you control the countryside, you also control the roads.

We have them just where we want them! All around us!

The Prevent Defense only works if there's a time limit to the game. Otherwise, you just lose.

7 comments:

Jeff Burton said...

If I were a news photographer, I'd be scoping out the sight lines to the U.S. Embassy's roof. Want to make sure to get a nice Pulitzer-winning shot of that last helicopter.

K T Cat said...

LOL. In a ghoulish way.

tim eisele said...

Letter presented without comment

The author is a former Marine who had served in Iraq before going to work for the State Department in Afghanistan.

K T Cat said...

I'd say go big or go home. Going halfway, which is what the Obama strategy looks like, is probably the worst choice of all.

Wollf Howlsatmoon said...

...Exactly the same friggin' losing strategy the Sovs used....

dammit

tim eisele said...

Well, to be fair to the Soviets (and to the British, and to the Persians), the last person to use a "winning strategy" in Afghanistan was Genghis Kahn. He basically just killed *everybody*, and started over. Which is not considered an acceptable approach these days.

I'm not so sure that anything short of that will "work", in the sense of resulting in a country that is not constantly on the brink of civil war.

K T Cat said...

I would think that if you said, "We will be staying here in force for two generations" that you'd have success. Other than that, it seems like a bit of a stretch to see a way to win. In some ways, Iraq was easier.