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Donald Rumsfeld’s doctrine of doing counterinsurgency warfare on the cheap, with very few troops and lots of air strikes, means that the ISAF has very little local intelligence and has to depend on air power, which worked well enough in the initial defeat of the Taliban in 2002, but just plain doesn’t work in counterinsurgency warfare, because that kind of warfare is about not firing until you know exactly who you’re shooting at.
The guerrillas don’t lose a single fighter in an operation like that. In fact, they gain huge numbers of recruits because everyone who hears about the air strike wants to volunteer to avenge the dead. By trying to do Afghanistan on the cheap, following the Rumsfeld Doctrine that air power can do everything, we’ve played right into the hands of the new and improved Taliban.
linkThat surge can't come soon enough. We need boots on the ground and Afgans need to be able to go about their day without fear. Air strikes during the day while the Pashtun insurgency threaten locals at night is not going to make that happen. Threatening the Taliban without understanding what it is to be a Pashtun is as effective as singling out Protestant Catholics while committing to a campaign that attacks all Catholics. You only end up stirring the hornets nest.
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The reason you don’t hear so much about the ethnic angle is simple: Neither side wants to push that angle in its propaganda. The Taliban would like to claim to be defending Islam, and the Americans are happy to go along with that, so they can say we’re fighting Islamic terror. But the fact is that the Taliban stands for old-school Pashtun tradition more than for Islam. And the Taliban is divided even further, with complicated loyalties to local warlords and tribal chiefs. There are three main factions right now, and the one that runs Kunar Province is run by an old friend of the CIA’s from the 1980s, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Hekmatyar was always a tough guy to handle, for the CIA and the Pakistani intelligence service, ISI, and when the foreign troops finally withdraw, it’s a safe bet that his faction of the Taliban will just switch to fighting the other two. But for now, the three factions seem pretty solidly united against the ISAF, the American-dominated occupying force.
So right now we are fighting on the same side as the Pakistani ISI. As far as I am concerned they may be wearing white hats but they are all black inside as they are the one who founded the Taliban to begin with with help from the CIA.
half of Taliban manpower and equipment originate(d) in Pakistan under the ISI$1:
In assessing the alleged links between the terrorists and the ISI, it should be understood that Lt. General Mahmoud Ahmad as head of the ISI was a "US approved appointee". As head of the ISI since 1999, he was in liaison with his US counterparts in the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Pentagon. Also bear in mind that Pakistan's ISI remained throughout the entire post Cold War era until the present, the launch pad for CIA covert operations in the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Balkans 22
In other words, General Mahmoud Ahmad as head of the ISI was serving US foreign policy interests. His dismissal on the orders of Washington was not the result of a fundamental political disagreement. Without US support channeled through the Pakistani ISI, the Taliban would not have been able to form a government in 1996. Jane Defense Weekly confirms in this regard that "half of Taliban manpower and equipment originate[d] in Pakistan under the ISI," which in turn was supported by the US.23 Moreover, the assassination of the leader of the Northern Alliance General Ahmad Shah Masood --in which the ISI is alleged to have been implicated-- was not in contradiction with US foreign policy objectives. Since the late 1980s, the US had consistently sought to side-track and weaken Masood who was perceived as a nationalist reformer, by providing support to both to the Taliban and the Hezb-I-Islami group led by Gulbuddin Hektmayar against Masood .
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