Gary Brecher, the War Nerd, describes the situation in Afghanistan by analogy:
If your exterminator says he just killed 200 rats down in the basement, is that good news or bad news?On the one hand, it’s good those rats are dead. On the other hand, I thought we got rid of them years ago, and now there’s hundreds? What’s going on?
That’s the Big Question everyone should be asking in Afghanistan. NATO’s claiming we killed 500 Taliban near Kandahar this month. That’s a mighty impressive body count, sure, but if Nam taught us one thing, it’s that body counts are a bad sign. For all sorts of reasons, starting with basic common sense: if we’re killing that many, how many more are running around out there?
Then he offers a solution, of sorts:
Too bad we didn’t give the Brits total control of the so-called GWOT and let them play it their way. I can tell you what the old 19th c. Brits would’ve done. Problem: huge, restless tribe (Pushtun) smarting from recent defeat and totally uninterested in “peace.” Solution: ship every Pushtun of military age to Sunni Triangle as honored guests of the British Empire and give them enough ammo to make the place as quiet and boring as Mary Poppins’s bedroom.The Pushtun would be happy as the Seven Dwarves, whistling while they worked on quieting down the Sunni; the Sunni would be. .. well, maybe not happy but definitely quiet — “quiet as the grave,” as the saying goes. And the Brits would step back into the shadows and let them fight it out till the end of time. A great system, worked for centuries.