Whack-a-Muj in Afghanistan

Harking back to my initial post on the battle for Marjah, Helmand province, I will gratefully concede to being partially wrong. The Taliban, although brutal and ignorant are no Al Qaida, and have failed to accomplish their leaders' intent in Marjah.

The plan was to suck ISAF in and cause massive (by current standards) allied casualties in a nest of IEDs and ambush positions that the opposition had several months' warning to construct and refine. Reports I read had it that Taliban leadership was annoyed with their guys failing to die for Allah and Mullah Omar, and I can easily believe that.

That's the good news. I used the whack-a-mole analogy in the post title, but hitting an insurgent force this way (e.g. not cordoning off the area and killing anyone with or near a weapon) is more like hitting water with a hammer. If it's not destroyed (ok, it's hard to destroy water in any permanent way, but you know what I mean) it simply flows elsewhere. In any event, these two quotes tell you everything you need to know about Afghanistan:

Helmand Gov. Gulab Mangal acknowledges that the Taliban have outright control of three of the province's 13 districts. In most other districts, the only areas where the government has control are the district capitals, according to residents and some government officials.

Mangal's appointee as chief of Baghran district, Abdul Razik, hasn't been able to take up the job because the Taliban won't let him enter the area. Instead, he works out of an office in Lashkar Gah, telephoning elders in Baghran to try to persuade them to switch sides.

"How can I go there by myself if they are in control?" Razik asked. "We don't have enough soldiers or police to go with me. I can't go alone."

and:

Michael Scheuer, the former CIA point man in the hunt for al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, cautioned against overstating Marjah's success, which he called "transitory."

"As long as we have 10,000 folks on the ground and open the spigot of greenbacks the success will continue," he said. "The U.S.-NATO-Karzai team will also get a boost from the large part of the media ... who will take a transitory local success and extrapolate it into a nationwide, permanent turning of the tide. How many times did we see that in Vietnam and in Iraq? How many times did the Soviets trumpet the same kind of victory in Afghanistan?"

Those who will not learn from history will keep attempting to splash around in the nation-building morass of Afghanistan. My equally dire prognosis for the democracy transplant in Iraq have not (yet) come to pass, but Iraq is a VERY different country than Afghanistan. That was merely a bad idea and unlikely to work, Afghanistan is quite possibly permanently broken.

Gen. McChrystal has not proven me wrong here in the big picture. The low quality of the human material he was up against is the only thing that has kept this from being another Fallujah, but the Taliban don't have to be brave and willing to martyr themselves to control the place in the long run. As they said, NATO has the watches, but the Taliban have the time.