re: #198 A hollow voice says,1st round on points. Onward!

If we’d hit the Taliban hard enough that their neighbors could overthrow them, the next lot would think very hard before making a similar alliance.

The “Taliban” have been around for centuries, loose groupings of clan leaders and warlords constantly at war with each other but coming together to fight rich invaders (see the Elphinstone Expedition for a worked example). They’ve been smacked around by experts (the Russians were not into nation-building but suffered from a “sunk cost” fallacy of constantly escalating their force structures in-country) and the clan leaders and warlords are still there, generation after generation after generation.

Unless some sensible invader is willing to slaughter every Afghan male aged eight and over without pity or exemption and rebuild the country from the ground up then all you can do is what the British in India did after trying to invade and control Afghanistan and failing, that is hold the passes and sow discord.

Frankly the US could have destroyed the local opposition in Afghanistan by simply paying them to kill each other. That wouldn’t have gone down well at home though since the US seems to have an aversion to bounties.