Thanks to RT for pointing this one out. A story posted on Canada.com quotes a Canadian Forces officer as saying we weren't expecting the Taliban to go guerrilla on us in Afghanistan:
"The Canadian Forces have been “caught by surprise” in recent months by a dramatic shift in the Afghanistan war that has seen the Taliban melt into the civilian population and spread into a far wider area, a top officer admitted Wednesday.
"The new enemy activity has prompted the kind of rapid “sea change” in tactics that used to be unheard of in the Forces, said Col. Mike Cessford, second in command of the Canadian mission here.
"Last year, troops were engaged in fierce fighting with large clumps of insurgents in a single, 20-square-kilometre area west of Kandahar, he said.
"Now the Taliban have dispersed among the province’s civilians and into a “multiplicity” of different districts, Cessford said in a frank assessment of the operation."
Let's see. The Taliban have no tanks, no artillery to speak of, no attack helicopters, no jet strike fighters, they're completely and utterly outgunned. So just what type of warfare were we expecting from them other than guerrilla fighting? It's called "asymmetrical warfare", the kind that the little people without the big toys fight, and there's no way our military leadership should have been taken by surprise by that.
Maybe Rick Hiller should contact General Petraeus in Baghdad and get him to send over an autographed copy of FM 3-24, the US General's seminal field manual on counter-insurgency warfare. Better yet Rick, you can get it in PDF on the internet at:
Unbelievable!
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