Regular readers of the Jawa Report will know the Taliban never really went away, they only went into hiding. Now, the MSM is beginning to pick up on the reality of the situation on the ground. Two of the main anti-Iraq war points are clarified by the facts on the ground in Afghanistan.

A) If only we had gone in with a larger coalition things would be better. Far more countries are in Afghanistan than Iraq, which is now a NATO-led security operation.

B) If the U.N. had been put in charge of rebuilding, things would be better. The U.N. is in charge of reconstruction in Afghanistan.

C) The Bush Administration doesn't have an Iraq exit strategy. Well, what is our Afghanistan exit strategy? We may be in that country just as long or longer than Iraq. Is lack of an 'exit strategy' a valid reason to oppose a war?

D) The Bush Administration did not sufficiently plan for post-war nation-building? And the U.N. has done a much better job in Afghanistan?

From what I gather, there are only two main differences between Iraq and Afghanistan which explain the much lower level of violence in the latter country. First, the resistance in Afghanistan today is basically the same resistance that we fought nearly four years ago. Remnants of the Taliban and their foreign jihadi armies have consistently fought us from our initial invasion to the present. The vast majority of these fighters understand that they were defeated and there is no hope of victory. Armies with no hope of victory soon lay down their weapons. I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of Taliban partisans in Afghanistan today are foreign jihadis or newer recruits that had little involvement in the fighting of four years ago.

In Iraq, we are fighting a different army and a different war. In our initial invasion we fought the Iraqi Army and Baathist partisans. Today we are fighting domestic and foreign jihadis. Those we fought in the invasion were trying to keep the Hussein regime in place. Today we fight a new enemy which has a goal of creating a Taliban like state in Iraq.

The Baathists and Iraqi regulars which we fought in our initial invasion know that we won and that they have no hope of ever coming back to power. They saw the awesome power of U.S. military might and are in no hurry to face that might again.

Those that we fight today, though, are religious extremists with a very different outlook. Combine this worldview--which like their Taliban brothers sees an inevetable victory for Islam--with their consumption of alternative media images which portrays the U.S. as losing in Iraq, and you have a highly motivated army. They fight because they think they are winning.

The second difference is the sheer number of boots on the ground and the urban setting of Iraq. We just have far more targets in Iraq than we have in Afghanistan and the jihadis in Iraq have a far easier time of hiding in urban centers. While many analysts claim that we need more troops on the ground in Iraq, it may very well be that we have too many (this is a disputable point and one which I am willing to change if more information comes to light). More troops would only help us win in Iraq if those troops could demoralize our enemy while simultaneously wipe out media images that portray U.S. soldiers in a negative light and which claim that we are losing. Until our enemies believe that cannot win, they will continue to fight. Yahoo News:

Though it's a far cry from the mass movement that overran most of the country in the 1990s, today's Taliban is fighting a guerrilla war with new weapons, including portable anti-aircraft missiles, and equipment bought with cash sent through Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network, according to Afghan and Western officials. While it was in power, the Taliban provided safe haven to bin Laden and al-Qaida....

Al-Qaida is channeling money and equipment," said Lt. George Hughbanks, a U.S. Army intelligence officer in Zabul province, one of the worst hit by the Taliban insurgency.

The Taliban is now a disparate assemblage of radical groups estimated to number several thousand, far fewer than when it was in power before November 2001. The fighters operate in small cells that occasionally come together for specific missions. They're unable to hold territory or defeat coalition troops.

They're linked by a loose command structure and an aim of driving out U.S.-led coalition and NATO troops, toppling U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai and reimposing hard-line Islamic rule on Afghanistan, according to Afghan and Western officials and experts.

The Taliban insurgents have adopted some of the terrorist tactics that their Iraqi counterparts have used to stoke popular anger at the Iraqi government and the U.S. military. They've stalled reconstruction and fomented sectarian tensions in a country that remains mired in poverty and corruption, illegal drugs and ethnic and political hatred.

Their tactics include attacks with homemade explosives, and beheadings, assassinations and kidnappings targeting public officials and others who cooperate in international democracy-building efforts and reconstruction.

The violence continued Thursday. A homemade bomb planted by the Taliban killed two U.S. soldiers near the southern city of Kandahar, bringing to at least 44 the number killed in hostile actions in the past six months.

Posted by: Rusty at 01:52 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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