Thursday, September 14, 2006

The Mystery of Punjwai - Where are the Bodies?

For more than a week, NATO forces led by Canada hammered Taliban insurgents they had bottled up in Panjwai district. The insurgents were shelled, rocketed, bombed and strafed relentlessly and it seemed like just about every day NATO was claiming a hundred or more fresh scalps. If you kept a running total, the Taliban ranks had been depleted to the order of many hundreds of insurgents by the time they slipped away during the evening of 10 September.

On 9/11 our people moved in, virtually unopposed and overran, not Taliban fighters, but their empty trenches. The Taliban, along with their weapons, had slipped through our fingers. Surely, though, they wouldn't have been able to get their dead out with them, would they? How could they remove hundreds upon hundreds of corpses without being detected? Seems to me they must have had their hands plenty full just getting the survivors out with their weapons.

Yet, if that's the case, the Taliban dead must be stacked up like cordwood or dumped in mass graves that we shouldn't really have that much trouble spotting. For some reason we're not finding the bodies and, unless that changes soon, we need to wonder why.

Why is this important? A war against an insurgency is a war of attrition. They don't have a homeland you can bomb into submission because their homeland is the very same turf you're defending and who wants to bomb their own, apart from the odd, trigger-happy American military pilot? They don't have the typical vulnerabilities of a conventional military force. No point wasting a lot of time trying to knock out a convoy of their fuel tankers when they run around on foot anyway. They're squirmy little buggers.



"Hello Infidels. Greetings from Afghanistan!"



No, to battle insurgents you have to find them, fix them in place and wipe them out. It's a battle of attrition, plain and simple. In Panjwai we certainly found them because they stood and fought. We fixed them in place, we actually had them surrounded. What we apparently didn't do was wipe them out. That little detail, however, hasn't stopped us from proclaiming a great victory. You can do that but only until the folks at home stop believing it.

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