Dear Moderate Taliban

By Semperpapa

The Sunday edition of UK Times Online has a report from Camp Bastion, Afghanistan, titled “Special Forces Assassins Infiltrate Taliban Stronghold in Afghanistan” in which the tale is told of Coalition Special Operations Units having begun going around the Taliban held city of Marjah looking to find and kill Taliban leadership in advance of a major offensive that will possibly start very soon.

The impending Marjah assault has been in the news for some time now, increasingly showing up on the reporting radar since President Obama finally authorized the surge of additional 30,000 US forces as requested by Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
The city is home for about 180,000 civilians, but it is also a hub for opium trafficking, a major source of financial funding for the Taliban. Marjah is also an enemy center from which the Taliban organizes the IED distribution.
Basically, the place is one that brings back some painful memories for so many Veterans of the Iraqi conflict and their families as it sounds like very similar to what our Military faced in Felluja.

Call me picky, but I have a little bit of a problem with the whole thing, in my humble opinion.
Far from advancing any criticism of the Military tactics, I am very concerned with the approach taken with this operation, which is called Moshtarak or “Together”.
Mainly, my question is why are we telephoning the enemy the impending attack? And now we are telling our enemy that Special Ops teams are already in the city?
The wisdom behind it, as the Military itself is speaking to reporters about it, is that they are looking for the psychological effect that these news can have on Taliban fighters, to convince them to lay down their weapons and leave the city.
I cannot tell where such a strategy came from, but it sounds a lot like we are hoping to reach the “moderate Taliban” in the bunch.
We are talking about people who strap explosives on their own children and, after drugging them, send them into crowds of innocent people. Are these examples of moderation we are hoping to reach?
And even if this strategy works and many of the enemy runs away from the city, where will they go? And won’t the problem be only repeated somewhere else?

In an age of highly sophisticated Military hardware, the best advantage a Military has in an operation like this is the element of surprise. Thankfully, the days of long sieges have been gone for centuries and even if I recognize that the level of civilization in Afghanistan is still back in those times, I find it irresponsible to purposely give the enemy an advantage, any advantage.

In the months preceding the June 6th 1944 landing in Normandy, the Nazi knew that an invasion was going to happen. The pouring of thousands of troops into Great Britain was a tell tale of that. To counter that, Hitler placed Gen. Erwin Rommel in command of the reinforcement of what was called the Atlantic Wall, or the defense against Allied invasion. Rommel, knowledgeable of the strength of forces he was facing, looked at the daunting task as he faced the reinforcement of 3,000 miles of coastline. The defenses he architected cost a lot of Allied lives at the time of the invasion, but was not as devastating as they could have been if Eisenhower would have declared that Normandy, not the Pas de Calais, was the place decided, allowing Rommel to concentrate his defense in the impact area. History might have been different if that was the case.

I do not have any doubt about the outcome of the Marjah operation, considering the overwhelming force the few thousands of Taliban fighters are facing, but publicizing the plans so far in advance is certainly giving the enemy the ability to plan its defense so to inflict the highest level of casualties on our forces. The disregard demonstrated by the Taliban for the safety of civilians will result in every square foot of the city being peppered with IEDs. Every civilian killed by these booby traps will be blamed on the ISAF troops with the help of the always sympathetic News reporters from CNN or BBC.

And I will be waiting for the inevitable report of criminal charges being filed against some of our Special Forces worriers for bitch-slapping some scum bag who just lit up some old lady or few kids.
But at least the Moderate Taliban will be happy.

And these are just my thoughts!