Run away! Run Away!

KABUL, Jun. 2, 2008 (Reuters) — Taliban insurgents are fleeing south towards the Afghan border with Pakistan in the face of a U.S. Marines offensive in volatile Helmand province, the NATO commander in Afghanistan said on Monday.

U.S. Marines have been pushing south from the former Taliban stronghold of Garmsir in Helmand for a month in an operation meant to cut off insurgent infiltration routes from Pakistan.

“They have shown under some amount of pressure they flee to their sanctuaries,” General Dan McNeill told a news conference.

“In the last two days we have had many reports … that the insurgents after experiencing these several weeks of pressure below Garmsir are trying to flee to the south perhaps to go back to sanctuaries in another country,” he said.

While McNeill was careful not to name any country, the only nation with which Helmand shares a border is Pakistan.

Mainly British troops have been battling the Taliban in Helmand since March 2006, capturing a string of towns in the fertile strip along the Helmand River cutting through the desert.

But Garmsir, the southernmost town of any size in Helmand, and its surrounding villages had previously evaded capture.

Washington dispatched 3,200 U.S. Marines to Afghanistan in March to bolster mainly British, Canadian and Dutch troops in southern Afghanistan after other NATO allies failed to come up with reinforcements.

Afghan officials have accused Pakistan of harboring Taliban militants, giving the insurgent leadership a base from which to direct operations and allowing fighters to use Pakistani soil for training, rest and recuperation.

Pakistan admits there is a Taliban presence in its border regions beyond government control, but says it does not help the insurgents, pointing to the hundreds of Pakistani troops who have died fighting the militants.

NATO and Afghan officials have also cautioned Pakistan over peace talks with Pakistani Taliban insurgents, saying such truces free up the insurgents to launch more attacks into Afghanistan.

“If there are insurgencies in places not in Afghanistan, but very close by, and security forces are not taking them on, I don’t think that bodes well for the whole region,” said McNeill, who is to hand command of NATO’s 50,000-strong International Security Assistance Force to another U.S. general on Tuesday.

“If there is no pressure on insurgents in sanctuaries out of the reach of security forces in this country then I think (Taliban) numbers are likely to grow,” he said.

Still not mentioning any country by name, McNeill implied the danger of such truces was that they could backfire.

“Burning a brush fire … on a windy day is a very dangerous business; you do not know where the flames or the embers are going to land,” he said.

A suspected suicide car bomber killed six people and wounded 25 in the Pakistani capital on Monday.

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aren't especially newsworthy. What you're talking about it simple displacement - as the article accurately notes, the Taliban don't hang around in areas holding high concentrations of Marines. Hooray, our team! The problem is that as soon as the Marines leave, the Taliban will come back - like bathwater returning to fill the space you occupied before you got out of the tub. Last time I checked, we don't have enough Marines to occupy all of the available places the Taliban can hide, so I don't see that as terribly newsworthy until you couple it with some kind of news that tells me we're employing some second strategy to drain the water from the bathtub altogether.

Chasing it right across the border where there are safe sanctuaries.

what a fucking waste of time

or pushing a rope,

or spinning their wheels,

or running in place...

According to your measures, we've been winning in Afghanistan and Iraq for 7 years. If we just keep on spending over a billion a week we'll keep winning for decades.

in an op ed piece in today's wall street journal, it was ventured that obama's opposition to iraq was "empirical" (it didn't work) rather than moral or strategic.

the supposition drawn from this, which i don't think i support, is that obama will be leave troops in iraq if he becomes president, as it's the pragmatic thing to do now that the surge IS working.

as i said, i'm not convinced one follows the other.

and it only takes 1 horrific car bombing to put the bad guys back in the news.

that said, it is encouraging that casualties are down, and that "high value targets" (the al qaeda in iraq brain trust) are being hit. in latin america FARC is also (reportedly) near collapse despite the largesse of venezuelan strongman/presdident for life hugo chavez.

i read a simple explanation a few months ago for america's long term difficutlies in quelling the iraqi insurgency:

we failed to implement the single most important lesson learned in vietnam, a generation ago. counter insurgency requires that "peacekeepers" secure the safety/security of the non-combatants first, in order to earn their trust and cooperation in providing the intelligence on the bad guys.

maybe that's finally changing?

anyway, i don't think rumsfeld, or bush, or that filipino/american general they had in charge at first had too much actual vietnam experience. and kerry certainly didn't either, what with lugging his "super 8mm" movie camera through the rice paddies so he could re-enact his exploits should the political need for such documentation every surface.

i didn't think the surge would work. i don't think one or 2 months proves it has. but i'll rejoice in lower casualties for our troops in any case.

to cousin "beya", who is an intelligence officer in kuwait - keep up the good work.

would still be whack-a-mole. You can drive over ground with armor or pulverize it with artillery or aerial bombardment, in either case, making the rubble bounce but the one truism about war, any war, is that to control a piece of ground, you must have an infantry soldier standing on it.

And in most wars, you can eventually exhaust the enemy's supply of soldiers who will contest that piece of ground. Unfortunately, we're dealing with an enemy that has an unfathomably large recruiting base, and until we do something to hinder that recruiting we won't ever win more than short-term battles. Whack-a-mole, indeed.