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Just ask the Taliban. News you can use re Afghanistan starts with the Taliban’s report that they slayed more than 5,000 of the hated Crusaders in righteous battle last year. AP:
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The Taliban has long exaggerated its military successes, but its recent claim that it killed more than 5,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan last year may be the militia’s most startling yet.
The Taliban said last week on its Web site that it killed 5,220 U.S. and NATO troops in 2008 — an exaggerated figure nearly 20 times the official death toll.
The insurgents also said they downed 31 aircraft last year, Its fighters destroyed 2,818 NATO and Afghan vehicles and killed 7,552 Afghan soldiers and police, according to a statement from a spokesman.
The wire service more terrorists trust, to its credit, points out that the Taliprop is verifiably off by nearly 5,000 on NATO deaths: There were 286 NATO toops killed in Afghanistan last year, 151 of them American. The numbers are in fact up, but for all the doom-and-gloom the AP and others have been pushing, it isn’t the Russian war yet, or even the Iraq one, or even close. The AP doesn’t challenge the Taliban’s claims on aircraft, vehicles and Afghan forces, though those also sound somewhat fanciful. Anyway, after knocking the Taliprop down, AP gives the Taliban some props:
Though the death toll was highly exaggerated, the Taliban have had increased success recently. Violence in Afghanistan has spiked in the last two years, and Taliban militants now control wide swaths of countryside. In response, the U.S. is planning to pour up to 30,000 more troops into the country this year.
The insurgents’ exaggerations are designed to boost morale inside the Taliban and to attract financing from donors sympathetic to their cause, a U.S. military official and a Taliban expert said.
I’d advise the Taliban just to reprint AP articles, or have mullahs read them out in the mosques, whatever. The version linked above doesn’t even include AP’s own 3,800 dead Taliban tally that was included, apparently as an afterthought, toward the bottom of a later version … but only after a lengthy, somehat irrelevant tangent of how U.S. estimates of Taliban and civilian death tolls sometimes change following investigations. It’s a given that small-scale American errors will always trump large-scale intentional acts on the part of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in AP and much of the other media coverage. In this case AP neglects to note, as usual, that the Taliban is responsible for the vast majority of nearly 2,000 civilian deaths last year, either through suicide bombs or through hiding and firing from civilian positions. Because … one more time … the AP sucks.
OK, enough APprop. There was one bit of useful information in there … the Taliban is not only colossally full of crap, it is desperate to recruit. I hope the hated Crusaders and their lackeys in Kabul are cranking up their own propaganda machine to counter the message.
Speaking of useful information re Afghanistan, Foreign Policy offers a lot of it in Nathaniel Fick and John Nagl’s myth-busting Counterinsurgency Field Manual, Afghan Edition. A couple of high points:
The new counterinsurgency doctrine represents a near total rethinking of the way the United States should wage war.
But such a rethinking has never been more necessary. Technological advances and demographic shifts point to the possibility of an increasingly disorderly world—what some military strategists are calling “an era of persistent irregular warfare.” The United States’ conventional military superiority has pushed its enemies inevitably toward insurgency to achieve their objectives. And in a multipolar world where small wars proliferate, there is reason to believe that this doctrine will shape not only the next phase of the fights in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the future of the U.S. military.
They note the success in Iraq, and note that Afghanistan is not Iraq, then go on to posit what else Afghanistan, contrary to popular opinion, is not:
Two myths persistently hamper U.S. policy in Afghanistan. First is the notion that the notorious border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan is ungovernable. The area, whose terrain resembles the front range of the U.S. Rocky Mountains along a border roughly the distance from Washington to Albuquerque, New Mexico, is home to the international headquarters of al Qaeda as well as much of the Taliban insurgency. However, the absence of a Western-style central government there should not be misconstrued as an absence of governance. The Pashtun tribes along the border have a long history of well-developed religious, social, and tribal structures, and they have developed their own governance and methods of resolving disputes. Today’s instability is not the continuation of some ancient condition; it is the direct result of decades of intentional dismantling of those traditional structures, leaving extremist groups to fill the vacuum. Re-empowering local leaders can help return the border region to an acceptable level of stability.
Second, Afghans are not committed xenophobes, obsessed with driving out the coalition, as they did the British and the Soviets. Most Afghans are desperate to have the Taliban cleared from their villages, but they resent being exposed when forces are not left behind to hold what has been cleared.
Fick and Nagl go point by point on COIN principles and how they specifically relate to Afghanistan. Then, tacked on at the end, there’s a quick Petraeus interview:
I told [then] Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in September 2005 that Afghanistan would be the longest campaign in the so-called ‘long war.’ That judgment was based on an assessment I conducted in Afghanistan on my way home from my second tour in Iraq. And having been back to Afghanistan twice in recent months, I still see it that way. Progress there will require a sustained, substantial commitment. That commitment needs to be extended to Pakistan as well, though Pakistan does have large, well-developed security institutions and its leaders are determined to employ their own forces in dealing with the significant extremist challenges that threaten their country.
Foreign Policy has undergone an online makeover, by the way, and is now in partnership with the most excellent Small Wars Journal. Its Passport blogs include Tom Ricks, former WPost scribbler and author of “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq” who kicks off with some gratuitous Bush-bash and a fun post about the media being at least as guilty of last-war fighting as generals, and Dan Drezner, author of “All Politics Is Global: Explaining International Regulatory Regimes,” taking smacks at Hugo and the ChiCom as well as a less gratuitous smack at Bolton and Yoo. Other Passport subblogs include the Shadow Government, produced by Philip Zelikow, Michael Singh and others. All looks to be promising ground for a range of thoughtful, informed views and snarking opportunities. You’ll find them blogrolled at right shortly.
Ace, meanwhile weighs in with another area of potential counterinsurgency exploitation. It’s the Taliban rape-slave initiative.
G’day Instapundit, Ace, Fausta, etal. Always so good to see you. If you enjoyed the gratuitous Talibashing, you’ll love what a Great American Correspondent has to say about the battle at the other end of the modern Persian Empire. Speaking of strategic encirclement, what the heck is Hillary up to, anyway? Meanwhile, armchair warriors who need a break from these endless battles may appreciate an Old Warhorse’s Best 2008 Reads.
Topics: Afghanistan, hated Crusaders, media, military
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:08 pm on Monday, January 5, 2009
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January 6th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
[...] Filed under: Posts — buttle @ 9:08 Jules Crittenden on the Taliban’s press agency, the Associated (with terrorists) Press. I’d advise the Taliban just to reprint AP articles, or [...]