And this "excess of confidence" was nourished by their general ignorance of the nature of the jihad ideology, and of the tenacity and patience it would inspire in the Taliban. "Taliban threat ‘underestimated,’" by John Thornhill in Financial Times, August 24 (thanks to Jeffrey Imm):
A senior French general in Afghanistan has admitted that the international security force has underestimated the threat posed by the resurgent Taliban.“We sinned through an excess of confidence,” said General Michel Stollsteiner, the French commander of the International Security Assistance Force in the Kabul region, following an ambush by the Taliban last week that killed 10 French troops and injured a further 21.
general ignorance of the nature of the jihad ideology
and the fact that the jihad ideology has a different timeline. muslims have a long term plan. they'd don't care if america falls this century or the next, as long it falls.
americans think "muslim extremists" don't have any brains. but their wrong....
I think the rapidity and the ease with which we unseated the Taliban in 2001...with fewer than 7000 soldiers on the ground at the time and very few casualties, contributed to all kinds of misconceptions on our part, including the perceived costs of regime-change in Iraq. Remember Rumsfeld being over-ruled after advocating an invasion force of only 50,000 for the job in Iraq...when it turned out that 130,000 was still insufficient to pacify the country. This kind of absurd analysis came on the heels of our success in Afghanistan.
As is said, sometimes success can be your own worst enemy.
Also, one need not be an Islamic scholar to comprehend the nature of "prolonged, popular war". Mao, the Vietnamese, and of course the Afghans all applied the concept successfully against enemies in recent memory. Anyone who thought it was going to be a short slog in Afghanistan was sorely lacking in the lessons of history.
was nourished by their general ignorance of the nature of the jihad ideology, and of the tenacity and patience it would inspire in the Taliban...
There was no "ignorance;" rather, the stubborn denial that jihad ideology existed in the first place.
Rumsfeld never intended to "win" a war; rather, he intended to "manage" the enemy on the cheap.
There is a paradigm in the West that "wars" are merely "police actions" in which the military is nothing more than a group of "peace keepers" who are not allowed to use "over whelming force" because to do so would be "unfair."
Western military pundits look at war strictly from an economic point of view as seek to minimize costs. Also, as long as your casualty rates are below 10% you can continue the police action forever.
Finally, by not having a declaration of war those who actually prosecute the "police action" on the ground can be subjected to all kinds of legal action for war crimes in civilian courts.
Unless we change our ideas in the west we have no business getting involved militarily anywhere.
You go to war with the idea that you plan on ending it by winning. If you have any other notion, stay home; because you WILL lose!
I hate to say this, but since the US military and its civilian leadership have bought into the idea that when an enemy is defeated by overwhelming force, the US needs to go in an rebuild the place it is probably cheaper, at least in the short run, to go in as a policing action not to win a war.
Now that I have read John Roy Carlson's "From Cairo to Damascus" (thanks, Hugh, for letting us all know about this *fascinating* and very instructive book), next on my Books To Read list are two works by Churchill: "The Malakand Field Force" and "The River Wars" (unexpurgated unabridged 1899 edition).
"The Malakand Field Force" describes war with jihadists in Afghanistan in the 19th century.
"The River Wars" describes war with jihadists in the Sudan in the 19th century (If any Aussie soldier is reading this, you ought to know that an Australian mounted contingent took part in the Sudan campaign, fighting alongside other forces of the British Empire).
All non-Muslim soldiers currently serving in Afghanistan, whether British, Australian, Canadian, USA, French, Danish, or any other, should delegate their families and friends to find them copies of "The Malakand Field Force".
They might also like to get their families and friends to track down - for the base library - a copy or copies of another book mentioned on this website by one of the posters, who found it eye-opening: John Masters' "Bugles and a Tiger: My Life in the Gurkha Regiment".
Our soldiers and the officers might find them useful for their highly un-PC commonsense observations about what Islam does to people and societies - and for survival tips.
Both 'Malakand Field Force' and 'Bugles and a Tiger" give a grassroots, boots-on-the-ground, Infidel soldiers'-eye view of what it's like to fight Muslims.
Throw in Mr Spencer's "Islam Unveiled", "PIG to Islam and the Crusades" and "Onward Muslim Soldiers,
and Andre Servier's "Islam and the Psychology of the Mussulman", available online:
http://musulmanbook.blogspot.com/
and our men in Afghanistan should lose their confusion. These books, just like Churchill's, don't beat around the bush.
Australian soldiers might enjoy reading, for fun and profit, Ion L Idriess, "The Desert Column" which includes many graphic descriptions of what it was like to go up against Turkish Muslims, man to man, hand to hand, first at Gallipoli and then in the lightning campaign from Sinai to Jaffa (with the Bedouin Arab Muslims, "the ghouls of the battlefield", perpetually sneaking, thieving, spying for both sides against the other, throat-slitting and grave-robbing all around the warring parties).
Hugh - do you know whether any ordinary Russians - soldiers or officers - have written anything much about *their* experiences in Afghanistan, which were pretty much identical with those of the British in the 19th century, or those of the allied forces today?
All of that said: none of us kafir countries should be burning men and money there, or anywhere else inside the Islamosphere, trying to do what can't be done - herding Kilkenny Cats, trying to create a sane and stable civil society out of a population suffused with Islam.
It's been one hell of a time-consuming and expensive way for our troops to learn how Muslims fight, and to get their noses rubbed in the sheer misery and desolation - familial, social, political, ecological - that Islam produces on the ground.
In 1922 Churchill said, of Iraq: "At present we are paying eight millions a year for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having ".
He was right. Iraq *was* "an ungrateful volcano", and it still is. So is Pakistan. So is Afghanistan. So why stay there? (Oh, and why bother wasting any more jizya on other 'ungrateful volcanoes', such as Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, or the Poor Palestinians [TM], or Turkey, or - this advice for the Australian PM - Malaysia and Indonesia? Why throw our lovingly-trained men and/or our hard-earned kafir cash into the gaping maw of the Islamic volcano? ).
I think that - aside from a massive strike from outside, in and then OUT, to smash Iran's little nuclear project - we'd be much better off putting all our energy into helping Israel, Thailand, India, the Philippines and Ethiopia, to crush the jihad assaults that are coming against them from within and from without; and helping countries on the borders of the Islamosphere, countries under actual or potential threat, like Timor Lorosae and Papua-New Guinea, Kenya and Uganda, to strengthen their defences and increase their deterrence capacity.