Taliban-Rope-A-Dope

Whatever you think of Iraq, Afghanistan must be even more worrisome as we are heating up over there right now and the Taliban are a more formidable adversary than Saddam or Zarqawi.

The Soviets, for example, tried to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, but lost sight of their goal and eventually became ensnared in a struggle for control of Afghan LOCs. This degenerated into a firepower intensive bloodbath in which the Soviets inflicted horrendous damage; but, in the end, they had to leave Afghanistan with their tail between their legs. Readers interested in the Soviet experience should click here for a stunning lessons-learned analysis of how nation building Soviet-style failed in Afghanistan. The same kind of degeneration into a mindless applications of firepower happened to US forces in Vietnam. In both cases, all the noble sounding rhetoric about winning hearts and minds of the locals was drowned and forgotten in a sea of mindless body counts and wanton destruction.

The reason we are sending in more troops to Afghanistan to try and prove the premise that Afghanistan was the good war and Iraq was the bad war. It is a political move to show that the Democrats are tough on National Security. These are the echoes of Vietnam much moreso than Iraq.

Yes...I've changed my mind on this issue the more I think about it.

UPDATE: The article about the Soviet experience in Afghanistan.

Unless there is a significant improvement in the quality of aid, President Obama is likely to be disappointed in his belief that a redoubled development effort will help bring peace to Afghanistan. The country probably needs less aid rather than more. It needs to tax its own people directly. (It scarcely does at the moment, and has little incentive to as long as the foreign checks keep flowing.) It needs a small army, not a big one, and a manageable social infrastructure, one it can afford. As happened in the past, pumping in more aid and sending in more advisers will simply reinforce the institutional barriers to progress. The pursuit of our immediate military goals is condemning Afghanistan to perpetual governmental, and thus economic, failure.

If you ask me, we should be pursuing a Rope-A-Dope strategy ourselves in Afghanistan. Minimal troops, build up a strong intelligence apparatus, and if the Taliban reconstitute themselves, undermine them by attacking their infrastructure and leadership. Keep them off balance and insecure. They will never be able to have a safe haven. Burn their poppy fields. Kill their leadership with drones. If they ever take control of villages or regions, put in spies, find their leaders and off them one by one.