Hawkmoon, when I read posts like the one you've just written I'm simply amazed that the Bush Administration hired you to do analysis in Iraq.
At the risk of wasting my time let me try to once again enlighten you.
First, you can't dismiss the fact that even the least sophisticated Taliban class of fighters can plant $10 IED's and effectively kill and wound our soldiers, costing us many millions of dollars in lost equipment, maintenance and man hours on the basis that:
"Wow!.. I guess we should disband the army because our soldiers, who are trained and paid at great cost, can easily be killed by one bullet worth less than .50 a piece.
Hell.. our multi-billion dollar Aircraft Carriers can be sunk by one 2 million dollar torpedo (probably cost is far less for a Russian or Chinese torpedo).
One speedboat in Yemen, filled with maybe a few thousand dollars worth of explosives critically damaged, and almost sunk, the USS Cole.
Then we can stop building skyscrapers because each of the multi-billion dollar WTC buildings was brought down by a jet liners worth maybe $150 million each..."
You are foolishly missing the fact that in order to assess whether a strategy is capable of achieving its objectives you must weigh MULTIPLE factors, and the most important factors are whether, over time, the COST/BENEFITS of your strategy will allow you to prevail.
So your simplistic assertion that bullets or torpedos are cheap and deadly is not analogous; the issue requires a complex calculation concerning the costs of getting the bullets or the torpedos to their targets, the effectiveness of the bullets or torpedos when they reach their targets and the sustainability of continuing to launch bullets and torpedos.
With respect to IEDs the conclusions that flow from an intelligent assessment are, from our American point of view, disastrous. From the perspective of the Taliban groups of fighters, on the other hand, the assessments are currently fantastic.
Why? ...Because their IEDs are easy to make, cheap, easy to plant, effective in causing disproportionate American deaths, injuries and losses of time, manpower and equipment, and because they suffer very few casualties and very little cost in "launching" them; i.e., the IED attacks are sustainable from their perspective.
So you and your three buddies that recommended your post are fricking idiots for trying to dismiss the deadly IEDs that are responsible for about 75% of our casualties with simplistic comparisons to other attacking strategies that have entirely disparate cost/benefit curves.
And your "solution" to the IED trap our soldiers are in:
"In sum, the way you get rid of those $10 IEDs is to eliminate the enemy chain of command and financial and logistic network.
That's what we were having great success in doing in Iraq in 2006-2008."
How are you going to make those smug pronouncements a reality?
First, there is very little in the way of chain of command for the Afghan fighters. They consist of many groups made up of local fighters, many of them united only in their opposition to our presence in Afghanistan. NO serious expert has seriously suggested that there is any kind of chain of command in the traditional sense. The people planting the IEDs can, and do, act on their own and the materials are readily available in that country.
And with respect to the "financial network" you want to "eliminate" to control the IED problem...what are you talking about when it takes a couple of local guys with a $10 IED who want to blow something or somebody up. Get real.
Finally, your assertion that we were having "great success" in eliminating the "enemy chain of command and financial and logistic network" in 2006-2008 Iraq reveals your failure to understand what happened in Iraq and what is happening in Afghanistan.
In Iraq we PAID our major insurgent enemy to stop fighting us. We gave him assurances of safety, arms and billions of dollars in American treasure to stop, temporarily, fighting against us. And in Iraq the Sunnis took the deal because it was the best deal they could make to pursue their real goal; opposing the Shiites who had, with our help, been marginalizing and killing Sunnis.
We've tried to buy off the nationalistic fighters and the Taliban forces in Afghanistan and guess what, they aren't selling.
So what's your fallback if they don't sell out for a share of power or American dollars? How are you going to "eliminate" an enemy chain of command that doesn't really exist and how are you going to disrupt a financial and logistic network that is so embedded and so frugal that you'd have to starve the country to do it?
So stop trying to sugarcoat a strategy that can only claim to be successful if "finding" a few $10 dollar IEDs at the cost of American lives and huge amounts of treasure is "success." If you want to be a real patriot instead of a shrill "traitor" shouting fool, quit posting unsupportable grand pronouncements about unreachable endpoints and suggest real as opposed to pie in the sky solutions to a problem that's sending good American men and women home to their families in body bags. Ed
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