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And now that appears to be happening big-time to the Taliban. Upwards of ten thousand Pakistanis crossed into Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban. (Little good it did them; as mentioned here before, untrained volunteers like that are almost useless.) Then those Pakistanis saw the Taliban bail out of Kabul, and they themselves lost heart or conviction in the cause, and now they're returning to Pakistan in droves, as many as didn't manage to get themselves killed or wounded or captured. Equally, support for the Taliban in Pakistan itself has dwindled. Their preachers continue to address crowds but the crowds seem strangely unenthusiastic, and suddenly it's no longer fashionable to wear T-shirts with the face of bin Laden on them. It took six years for US morale to collapse during the Viet Nam war; it took about a week for that of the Taliban to shatter. That's one of the differences between them and us. Much of their power was based on fear and intimidation and most of the rest was based on bandwagon effect. Those are very fragile assets. Few in their force were motivated by loyalty or a belief in the cause. And that is why they lost. Most of their force abandoned them when they became losers, and in any case in modern warfare numbers of bodies don't matter. What matters is military power, and to understand that you have to understand force multipliers, which at its lowest terms means that not all soldiers are equally dangerous. Based strictly on numbers, the US has more men involved in this fight than the Taliban did, but few of those Americans are in Afghanistan. But when you consider that the three carriers in the Arabian sea collectively carry crews of about 16,000, and add to that all the crews of the support ships in three carrier battle groups, and all the ground forces in Oman and on Diego Garcia and elsewhere supporting all the bombers, and AWACS and aerial tankers, and the logistics troops involved in keeping them all supplied, and planning and command forces in Central Command and back to the Pentagon, not to mention the substantial manpower involved in intelligence, the United States may well have upwards of a hundred thousand men directly involved in this war already. Because of that, each special forces man on the ground in Afghanistan was quite literally worth a battalion in terms of actual combat power, because there was a battalion standing behind every single one of them. (This war has the lowest tooth-to-tail ratio of any war I've ever heard of, by a very long margin.)But one American forward air controller team (say, five men) has had the ability to direct and apply more firepower than two thousand Taliban troops dug in around Mazar-e Sharif. A couple such FAC teams were able to so severely degrade the combat ability of the defenders as to make it possible for Northern Alliance forces to walk into the place virtually unopposed. That's because they operate with an unprecedented force multiplier; it's no exaggeration to call each of them an "army of one"; there have been many armies in history with less combat ability then each of those men. But that's because they were the tip of a very large iceberg. And indirectly because of their attachment to Northern Alliance forces, the combat power of each Northern Alliance man probably rose ten-fold, so that a relatively small Northern Alliance force was able not only to defeat the Taliban, but to completely rout them while suffering minimal casualties. And that's one of many reasons why those hastily-organized Pakistani formations of untrained men were virtually useless in combat, and didn't end up making any military difference. They were dealing with an almost negligible force multiplier by comparison to their enemies. Cannon-fodder do not win wars, and that's all they were. (discussion in progress) |
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