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"And now the hard work or reconstruction begins."

It should have begun years ago. This problem has been identified over and over. This is a battle for hearts and minds not a piece of territory. The reconstruction efforts have achieved minimal progress. The Taliban have come back bigger and better. They have resources. They have at least some local support.

Have the Taliban got a sufficient supply of recruits? Yes. They have at least millions that they can call on from Pakistan. Worse still, for a variety of reasons adding up to increase Afghan support, the Taliban are recruiting locally in Afghanistan too. The limitation is on supplies and training. But there the Taliban are doing well too.

It is obvious that the Taliban has had havens where they can train, rest and recruit in Pakistan. Recently it has become evident that the Taliban has been getting important support from Iran. [The Taliban has not always received support from Iran but it does now.] Poppy farming is making cash for farmers and the sale of the opium is giving the Taliban cash flow.

In the same circumstances, it would be difficult to defeat an insurrection in the USA and the USA has the best funded police and anti-spy orgainsiations in the world. The USA can and does spy on her citizens as well as any governemnt in the world Just imagine the following.

An organisation who could safely recruit in the churches, slums and universities of the USA and then remove the recruits to Canada where they could not be attacked but could train in safety with ample resources.


An organisation who could safely recruit from a population as big as Canada and Mexico combined. It does not need to attract every young male to its cause, one in a hundred is plenty.

An organisation that has the blessing and support of many churches and churchmen some of whom are actively involved in the fight. A religion where these same churchmen teach that the cause of the organistion is a holy cause.

This organisation receives support from several foreign governments and individuals in the form of arms and munitions and cash money totalling many tens of millions but possibly more every year. In the nation which provides the safe havens there is much popular support and members of the government and military have much sympathy if not direct links to the organisation.

This organisation has an almost independent cash flow from the selling of drugs to the USA measured in the hundreds of millions, possibly a billion US Dollars, every year and growing.

Lastly there is an almost undefended almost undefendable border allowing ready ingress to the USA.

The USA has enough armed gangs of young men now. Imagine them motivated, trained, better armed and led and with a cause to die for. Good as the US Army and FBI are it would stretch them. But worst of all, while the motivation, the means and the conditions exist, the gangs/organisation would just keep coming back no matter how many were killed. In the situation in the Afghan region, blood feuds are a way of life so killing one lot of bad guys recruits the next lot.

And in the Afghan situation, it is foreigners, non-believers and worse [Americans, English and Europeans] who are doing the killing of the "bad guys" at least some of whom are going to be friends and relatives of the locals.

If the reconstruction has started, good. If it has not, has the Coalition done anything to assist the community in a permanent and visible way? If we have not done anything more positive than shot up some Taliban and Taliban supporters, how much has been accomplished?

If the assault involved "collateral" damage, the assault may not have been a net gain.

There needs to be a lot more reconstruction. There needs to be a lot more involvement of the Afghans in the fight against the Taleban. Presently they do not seem to have an army worthy of the name [and I find that curious because war is what they have known in Afghanistan for a long long time]. Presently the Taliban are actively and successfully recruiting from the Afghans.

Note that the British had maintained a position in the town itself so that locals had the British troops there all the time. It was not as if the British left the area and came back to find that the Taliban had returned. The British had never left.

The Taliban has never been able to "to prevail in any direct military confrontations with Nato forces" except in small battles and in a temporary way. If the Taliban allows itself to be drawn into a conflict and pinned down in numbers, they know that they are going to have an airstrike on top of them. They have to expect armour and helicopters to arrive in support.

In this firefight, just as described in the "comment", when the Marines find a fortified position they call in an air strike and it stops being a fortified position. It is the sensible way to fight when you can and the Taliban cannot confront it.

Two thousand four hundred US Marines with helicopter support chase away some hundreds of Taliban. If they had had the same troops on the Western front in WWI they would have been able to break the German lines almost anywhere. That is a lot of fire power.

When in the comment the writer talks about a static line of defence, he is mistaking the conflict for something out of the early years of WWI. Ten thousand Taliban could not successfully defend a position against the forces deployed in the operation in Garmsir. The best that they could hope to manage would be a fighting withdrawal.

So the short answer is that the Americans have not done what the British failed to do in two years. It is likely that the Americans have failed to do what the British have failed to do in two years. There is no reconstruction. The local populace still [and possibly more so] support the Taliban. The Taliban still can train, recruit, resupply at will better than two years ago.

i worry that the NATO forces are not supporting each other. I worry that there is not an overall strategy being followed that allows victory against the Taliban. I worry that the NATO forces are not coordinating and supporting each other. I worry that NATO forces are not following the same strategy and are not following similar complementary tactics. This article makes it sound like there could be allegations that the Allies are competing in some ways with each other.

Firstly, reconstruction, or construction, regularly starts when there is less than perfect security. You yourself have noted that NATO troops are building fortifications. Australia has a few hundred engineers doing precisely that right now. Reconstruction is what they need. Economic development is what they need. The Taliban are bringing cash into the community

It is a battle for the hearts and minds otherwise the Taliban can come back and keep coming back because they have not run out of troops, resources or motivation. Most importantly, there is enough local support for the Taliban to persist. There is not the hostility necessary to get the Taliban kicked out by local Afghans or even informed on.

There once was but there is not now. The Coalition are not seen as liberators. They are not seen as a way forward or at least a way of surviving. They are seen as capricious, unfair, violent and uncaring by too many Afghans. How the Afghans are treated appears to vary with which set of troops is in attendance.

I was unaware that the people of Fallujah supported the Americans now. I would like to know more. Even so, destroying a town to save it raises some issues.

I suppose that it depends on which Germans are talked to but i have heard some who were not that pleased with the British Bomber Command.

"NATO have concentrated on building fortifications from which they have made the occasional sally into hostile territory." I suspect that you are talking about some specific situations because I know that the Australian and British troops do go on patrol. I know that the SAS are doing their thing too. Whatever else the SAS do, it is hardly ever defending fortifications.

You possibly are taking a metaphor literally. There has not been much progress in Helmund Province for precisely the reasons stated. There are insufficient troops to garrison every town. The Allies are popular as poison in many of them. The central Government has no writ here. The Taliban have ready access to the area.

All that the troops can do is to disrupt the Taliban, their bases, their supply routes and try to make life difficult for them. The fighting has not progressed in two years because the Taliban can keep coming back in spite of heavy casualties.

But the fighting has changed. The Taliban are going in for roadside bombs and suicide bombers now and they are doing that precisely because they cannot now and never have been able to confront NATO firepower. And the Taliban are brining the fight to the Government of Afghanistan and the Coalition by not attacking in the south or only in the south but taking the fight to the more secure areas. See the recent suicide attack on the leadership on Afghanistan.

What you are arguing against is exactly what the US Marines have just done.