High ranking Taliban Leader Captured.

There will always be a new top guy. But if their average term as leader lasts less than a year, then they will never develop into effective leaders. Decapitating the insurgent leadership while winning the hearts and minds of the locals is the Petraeus formula for counterinsurgency, and McChrystal is implementing it well.

The rank and file of the Afghan insurgents are young men with no jobs, too little to do, and too much testosterone and zealous rhetoric from foreign Jihadists based in Pakistan. It's cheaper and more effective to induce them lose heart in the Taliban ideology and find opportunities in the civilian economy than to try kill them one by one with a lot of civilian casualties. Better to target their leaders one-by-one and give their Afghan grunts a way to change sides, open a falafel stand, and get prosperous instead of dying for an un-winnable jihadi dream of Egyptians and Arabs who hide in Pakistan while sending Afghan muhajadeen to fight for them.

 

There are many things that speak to these people and money is only one. What we have to be concerned with is spending our money where it helps us and not wasting it where it doesn't. If it costs us $20,000 to kill a single illiterate insurgent, but we can get him out of the fight by spending $1000 to protect his village from the Taliban and $1,000 for him to start a falafel stand or build a chicken house or irrigate his fields to triple his income . . . then we've saved 90% which can go to buying more Hellfire missiles to kill the AL Qaeda leadership in Pakistan

We're getting a ton of covert Pakistani government support. We're hitting 3 times the targets because we are getting good intel from Pakistan at long last. Al Qaeda screwed up when they started bombings inside Pakistan and it turned the Pakistani government against them. The Pakistani population is still largely anti-American, but they are starting to realize that the Egyptian and Arab-led AL Qaeda has an agenda that is not healthy for Pakistan.

 

There are two flavors of the taliban (arabic for religious student). First of all, there is The Taliban (upper case) which were the repressive former rulers of Afghanistan. These are hard-core islamists whose movement began in Pakistan but moved to Afghanistan to take advantage of the chaos after the Soviets left. They are a fundamental islamist government movement that supported and gave bases to Al Qaeda in their attack upon the US. We took down their government by assisting their internal enemies to overthrow them. The leaders of The Taliban government now hide in Pakistan and are major targets of US covert action to kill or capture.

There is another taliban. These are the home-grown insurgents that are fighting the Afghan government and the US in Afghanistan. These are local Afghans, not Pakistanis, and see themselves as nationalist freedom fighters. During the Soviet invasion, they called themselves the muhajadeen and with US help, they defeated the Soviets, of which they are very proud, like they defeated the British invaders in the 19th century. When The Taliban controlled the nation, many of these fighters joined the islamic cause, while others joined the dissident tribes.

Now that The Old Taliban is gone, the local muhajadeen/taliban fighters are being nationalist again and see their mission to defeat the occupying Americans so that they will leave, like the Soviets did. These insurgent taliban have no agenda of attacking the United States or anyone outside Afghanistan like the former Taliban government did in allying with Al Qaeda. They fight foreign troops because they are there. They fight their traditional tribal enemies allied with the Afghan government because they have done so for millenia.

The current strategy is to overtly and covertly kill and capture The Taliban jihadist leadership wherever we can find them. But the strategy with the taliban insurgents is to use the carrot and the stick to induce them to change sides or sit it out. This will allow us to go home which is what both sides want.