Stardate 20011113.0605 (On Screen): If reports are to be believed (and I think they are), the Northern Alliance will soon control the road east from Kabul without too much struggle. Taliban forces in Jalalabad are pulling out, and the Torkham border station has been abandoned. It remains to be seen what will be involved in taking Sarowbi, which may be the only place that substantial combat is required.
More surprising is word that Taliban forces may be abandoning Kandahar as well, to move into the mountains to go guerrilla. I'm less convinced by these reports, but something like this will inevitably happen sometime even if not immediately. Unlike the kind of set-piece fighting which has been going on until now for which modern air power is superb, that would be much more difficult to deal with. But there actually is a solution, and it's the one Cambodia used against the Khmer Rouge: wait 'em out. You isolate them, cut the flow of supplies, try to make sure few locals support them, and let them wither away over the course of 20 years. You don't try to fight them directly because there isn't any point; the idea isn't to defeat their men but to use up their supplies. Combat is low level and chronic, but you don't make the mistake of going in to try to root them out, because you never will. But when their food runs low, and after years of stagnation, their power will shrink as men die or desert. It's a slow process but reasonably sure if you handle it correctly. Guerrillas cannot operate in a vacuum; they still eat and use up clothing and medical supplies, and so the flow of supplies is what you target, not the guerrillas themselves. 5000 men will require at least a thousand tons of supplies a year once their stockpiles run out, so where does it come from? Well, either it's contributed or it's sold. If it's contributed, you figure out who is doing the contributing and work on making that stop. If it's sold, eventually the guerrillas will run out of money (especially if you're working on seizing their assets).
If the guerrillas are no threat internationally and no threat to whatever new government is put into place in Afghanistan, then they no longer matter. (discuss)
