Re: Eight Americans killed in Afghan attack: US embassy

[Guest guest]

That is the nature of guerilla warfare. Attacks come anywhere at any time, forcing the target army to be as strong as possible everywhere. That makes for a very expensive operation and wears out the men involved since they never know when they might get hit. Its these attacks, the shelling, etc., that does a little damage at a time. But that is the main damage: time. Time equals attrition of men and money. The goal is to drive the target army out by destroying the political will of its home nation to continue the fight and withdraw the troops. We are fortunate in a way that we have more technology that the Russians because one thing the Afghans did that hurt them so badly was to use rockets and mortars to hit the airfields and destroy expensive planes on the ground. We have systems that can shoot down incoming bombs like that, most of the time, before they impact.

I have read in a couple of counter guerilla books that it take a ratio of 15 or 20 occupiers to one guerillas to have any effect and also 10 to 20 years of occupation time. That time is needed in order to train a sufficiently large and competent local level police force composed of natives and not occupiers. We haven't come close to a decent police force in Afghanistan or Iraq yet in part because we haven't bothered to try to make one until lately. That's a lot to talk about, but that's for another time.

In a message dated 12/30/2009 5:39:39 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, no_reply writes:

Eight Americans killed in Afghan attack: US embassy