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Progress is being made, but it's not visible. The first stage of the campaign took about three days; its purpose was to nullify the Taliban air defenses. This consisted of destroying airfields and jets (such as there were of them) but most importantly of destroying SAM batteries and the radars which aimed them and the control centers which ordered them to be fired. The second stage of the campaign was a general assault on Taliban centralized resources; it consisted of attacking caves where the Taliban were suspected to be keeping either command and control facilities or large concentrations of ammunition. In addition, ammunition and fuel dumps and large concentrations of artillery and armor were attacked. As well, during this phase every known al Qaeda installation, even abandoned ones, was attacked and destroyed. That phase, too, is now complete. Once those things had been done, it was possible for our Special Forces to operate. We can be certain that many such operations have taken place and that we will never learn of most of them. Our air forces are now engaged in three main missions. First, they are patrolling to look for smaller Taliban assets on an opportunistic basis. Specifically, they're hunting for moving supplies, moving troop columns, moving tanks, and any artillery they can find. Second, they are bombing static concentrations of Taliban forces. Third, they are providing close support for any Special Forces operations on the ground which require it, either offensively or defensively. The tactics in a war have to be tailored to the specific situation. The goal of this campaign is to try to get Taliban forces to defect in large numbers. That's always a goal in any war, and depending on circumstances it varies in effectiveness. Against the Japanese in WWII it was nearly useless. Against the Taliban, there's good reason to believe that it will be extremely effective. Wars in Afghanistan are not like wars elsewhere. They do not have large armies there; what they have is groups of small armies which cooperate -- at least for a while. Those small armies (anywhere from 50 to 1000 men, with most being on the smaller side) tend to change sides readily, and always have. Actual combat is more rare, and when it does happen it tends to involve little actual bloodshed; it's more of a show of force to try to intimidate the other side by demonstrating what you could have done to him; often the point is to convince him to abandon his losing team and join your winning one. The commanders of these small armies don't have the kind of control over their own forces that we ordinarily think of in an army; a commander who tends to fight bloody battles with large numbers of casualties among his own men will find all his troops deserting him to join forces run by more reasonable guys. This is the Our strategy is keyed into this, because most of the Taliban's military capability is composed of such small armies. The purpose of the current campaign is to erode support amongst the various warlords who currently support the Taliban, to try to get them to either become neutral or to actively join the opposition. Special Forces units have been visiting these warlords to talk it over. (That's another tradition; these warlords tend to have and expect excellent communications with the other side, because they're constantly talking with each other about one or the other defecting.) Some of what we've been doing with the bombing has been to try to convince these warlords that the Taliban are losers and have no hope of prevailing. That's why Mullah Omar's compound was bombed, for example; it demonstrated that he himself had no defense. Equally, the empty al Qaeda installations were annihilated; partly that was to make sure that they never were used again, but even more important was that this was an opportunity to use very large and effective weapons while causing negligible casualties, so as to demonstrate what we could be doing elsewhere if need be. That's completely in line with how the Afghans tend to fight their own wars. When they order a major artillery barrage it doesn't always fall where it would do the most damage; its point isn't to kill the enemy so much as to impress him, so that he learns what could have happened. When Afghans actually get slaughtered in large numbers they tend to retaliate in kind and become extremely vicious (because the other side was cheating), but when they are given a convincing demonstration of frightfulness they tend to switch sides. The only part of the Taliban's forces which will not play by these rules is the "Arabs" (as the Afghans call t 
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