Captain's Quarters -

I am expecting an MSM report about the 'dreaded Afghan winter' any day now.

Where do all the virgins come from?

Simple math would indicate that at least some of the "glorious martyrs" will be short-changed.

Capt: for the first time in the History of Warfare, the Goals of BOTH sides in a conflict are exactly the same!

The Jihadis want to Die for their Allah and Virgins, and we want to kill them so they can go to their Allah and get their mythical virgins!

And Ghilmans too, but they don't like to talk to us apostates about that nasty little part! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghilman)

Oh yeah, sorry, forgot, according to Ahmanutjob, there are no "homosexuals" in Iran, or Islam; it's just an American/Western invention!

Ah yeah.....

Regardless; the Jihadis want to die, and we're killing them, I see this as a Win-Win situation for both sides!

Both sides thus have the exact same goal, for the first time in the history of warfare, I say rejoice!

I don't believe this.

I mean, I literally do not believe that this report is accurate. I count myself as a bit of a military historian, primarily on WW2 and the American Civil War. The only times I can ever remember seeing such lopsided casualty rates was in cases where the attackers charged blindly against fixed defensive positions -- Japanese banzai charges, or the Union attacking the stone wall at Fredericksburg. Open-country fighting where fire-and-maneuver tactics are possible -- no, I just don't believe it. It takes a very rare blend of command incompetence on one side and skill and luck on the other to produce such results. One killed and four wounded? Hell, a mortar barrage alone should have done more damage than that!

I suspect the Taliban casualties are being misreported -- not intentionally, but rather because of the fog of war. Double counting, maybe, or estimates based on before-and-after strength evaluations.

"and the few who return to Taliban bases"

They still have bases?

While the aircraft are doing a magnificent job attacking the attackers why not do a flyby or two on their bases.

Do them a favor and send them to their Allah and 72 virgins a few days sooner.

I suspect that if we're still in Afghanistan ten years from now we'll still be reading about how we're killing more of them etc.
In both Iraq and Afghanistan we seem to have forgotten that our goal WAS to produce a strong national government and leave.

"When you find yourself in a hole, STOP DIGGING"

ps What happens when they run out of virgins?

Wolfwalker,

Believe it.

I have first hand reports from Afghanistan (Canadian Forces in the Panjwai district), and I can assure you that the Taliban are suffering major losses.

Canada's LAVIII have a little bit of a reputation with these guys (the green monster) - mainly for vaporizing anybody who wants to start a skirmish.

In fact, I would say these numbers are conservative. It's common that after major NATO offenses, Taliban forces quickly gather the bodies (or what's left of them) in order to artificially dampen the causality rate.

I would trust these numbers.

Wolfwalker,

You may be right in your assessments. Still, when one side has access to armor, artillery, and precision air strikes, and the other does not - it seems more than plausible to me that these numbers are largely accurate.

"Omar and his Taliban commanders have helpfully agreed to die in large numbers on their own."

Uh-huh. Doubtless Omar is in the front of each charge like Sean Connery in The Wind and the Lion. Rather, like that 68 year old colonel of suicide bombers the Iranians trotted out for the press during their recruiting drive, I suspect old Omar will be the last man standing if he can help it.

"In both Iraq and Afghanistan we seem to have forgotten that our goal WAS to produce a strong national government and leave."

True enough. However, the danger is that until we eradicate the ideology of hate against the West and the culture of death that is motivating the jihadists, they will simply move from Iraq and Afghanistan into whatever new sanctuary opens up.

The recent declaration of war by AQ against Musharref in Pakistan is a clear warning that, now that AQ is losing support within Iraq and Iraq is beginning to stabilize and their goal of finding another safe haven there is in jeopardy, Osama and AQ consider Pakistan their next likely sanctuary.

Pakistan offers 3 additional benefits:

1) It's right where they are already.

2) There's still considerable support for AQ among the tribal areas and within Pak's military and intelligence services.

3) Pakistan is already nuclear.

We have to remind ourselves that jihadists live in the Islamic culture, which much more patient than ours. So, while we may wish that we'd already achieved our goals based on our Western, myopic, instant-gratification, election and 24-hour news cycles, they're willing to wait until our resolve is gone.

Rather than pushing them to new sanctuaries elsewhere, perhaps it's more in our long-term interests to keep them in relatively open, desolate, less-densely populated areas where we can continue to kill them without inflicting unnecessary civilian casualties and property damage.

fdcol63 : Everyone gets 72 virgins ... the same ones. Its like a time-share.

wolfwalker -- remember, Iraq and Afghanistan are Bush's Vietnam. No doubt the cunning Taliban are fading back into the jungle after each ambush so we can't assess their casualties.

Derek. you obviously don't understand. Wolfwalker and gregdn are relics of VietNam. They have the mindset that you use numbers as political tools (and, by extension then, so does everyone else). They don't like to see high casualty numbers because that means that you-know-who is being successful in his prosecution of the conflict.
gregdn is just being obfuscatory when he makes his catty remark about setting up a government. Even an idiot knows you don't walk into the middle of a firefight and start setting up voting machines. Idiots do know that, don't they gregdn?

I can understand a vietnam vet being suspicious of body count numbers.

Wolfwalker

When considering relative losses a better comparison may be Omdurman - around 10,000 Dervishes were killed, 13,000 were wounded, and 5,000 were taken prisoner. Kitchener's force lost 48 men with 382 wounded, the majority from MacDonald's command (per Wikipedia).

In Omdurman there were 17th century warriors fighting 19th Century Soldiers.
Now we see the results of 17th century warriors fighting 21st century soldiers and airman.
Maybe you should broaden your review of history.
Funny how some things stay the same.

mdmhvonpa,

And may they all look like Helen Thomas and Nancy Pelosi, Peace Be Unto Him. LOL

More and more the Taliban resembles the Black Knight from Monty Python:

"tis but a scratch!"

Marinevet:
“We have made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team,” Bush said, in a clear reference to the tabulations of enemy killed that became a hallmark of the Vietnam War."

This is a quote from the National Review online.
Although Bush was referring to Iraq, my point was that, in both nations we seem to have changed our focus to just that- body counts.
And your bizarre comment that you don't wander into a firefight and set up voting machines seems to belie the fact that both countries have had elections.

Ghilman

Read it!

You'll see more evidence of Taiqyah or "Islamic Lying"!

It's okay to lie to us, we're nothing but sub-human Apostates, and thanks to the Anti-American/Pro-Jihadi Leftist Nutbags in this country (read: Democrats!), the Allies of the "Jihadis", we're just stupid enough to accept their BS at face-value, so we can surrender as quickly as possible!

Never let Victory or Right stand in the way of a good Surrender, especially if you can help destroy America in the process!

I am not saying I don't believe it. But I don't get it.
One report said the Taliban "flowed" reinforcements to the fight. You attack a heavily armed convoy--lost a hundred doing that a couple of weeks ago--or a fixed position, both of which have already proven tough propositions.
And, when the bodies stack up, you run in more bodies.
I recall watching some el ed boys having a snowball fight after a church function. They showed greater tactical sophistication than the Taliban. Presuming we're getting the story right.
Perhaps the entire group, including the second and third waves, booked after the first wave was pulverized and was caught in the open by air.

Cavalry (the horse kind) liked to dine out on the regiment's famous charges. But they made their money cutting up fleeing troops after the Infantry and artillery had broken the opponents.

Maybe this is the answer???

Otherwise, I don't get it.

Guys:

Why we are fighting? Vietnam, Jungles? Please. Had you seen the Afghan terrain. If we are finding bodies is because there were not enough of their comrades left to take them away.

No exactly a victory of hiding in the non existant jungle to fight another day. BTW, numbers are accurate because unlike Nam. We are getting DNA samples of each casualty, just to know if we kill someone high in our shit list.

There had been a revolution into military technology and we are looking at the results. One plane, one bomb to do what used to take a whole squadron of heavy bombers. There is a similar situation being applied to infantry operations. Of course, it don't help when the enemy tactics seems to be the old SciFi "Leap and Scream" deal.

Richard,

It's really not that difficult. Because of the Asymmetrical nature of this war, the Taliban are gaging their success on what we see as minor setbacks.

From the discussions I've had with soldiers, the Taliban will fight tooth and nail just to destroy an armored vehicle - whether it be a Nyala, LAV, or tank, that to them is a victory worth dying for.

Also, since major operations began in the Shaikot Valley, Taliban forces have had limited weapons to use against NATO's airpower and APC's. This is in stark contrast to the war the Soviets fought (see: CIA - Stingers).

The reality of the matter is that Taliban fighters are dying by the boat loads - and not just from air and armor operations. You can be assured that our soldiers are putting good 'ol fashioned bullets in them as well.

I've seen the images and I've seen the videos. They're dying in numbers we will prevail.

gregdn,

"Although Bush was referring to Iraq, my point was that, in both nations we seem to have changed our focus to just that- body counts."

Nonsense.

The primary objective of ridding the Taliban from the area in order to setup a stable government hasn't changed.

Body counting is the current focus because it's a necessary and vital step for the transition to take place. As long as Taliban fighters are engaging our troops and attempting to destabilize the region, we will gladly continue to count their dead.

I have no trouble believing these reports.

The Taliban are medieval bozos. During the 2001 campaign, the snipers from Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry killed dozens of Taliban and al Qaeda from great distances. According to the Canadians, the Taliban and al Qaeda kept jumping up from cover to taunt the Americans in the time-honored fashion of their ancestors.

The Canadians would blow their heads off with .50 caliber rifles. So here's the scene: You're a Taliban idiot crouching behind a rock. Every time one of your buddies stands up, his head explodes in a horrific shower of gore. So what do you do? You stand up, too.

"They just don't learn," said one of the Canadian snipers.

If you go to YouTube, you can find gun-camera film from Afghanistan and Iraq that shows our helicopters and gunships blasting the absolute hell out of "insurgents" with 30mm cannons, usually when the morons have just carried out an attack and are strolling along afterward, as casually as if they're on an afternoon walk. They don't understand the technology of long-distance surveillance.

We're dealing with very primitive people here. Plenty of Americans are incapable of accepting anything that doesn't comport with their preconceived notions; yet we expect Arabs, Pushtuns, and Tajiks to be more advanced than us?

listen up people.

afhganistan was a war of liberation, it went quite well despite the nay sayers that said we couldn't fight in snow (didn't think about the montana, idaho, northdakota ..... boys that go out in it for FUN.)

iraq was a killing field. (a fellow goes out in the flats and hollars A&&#h eats @#$ @#$%, runs like hell and his buddies kill all of the screamers that come to kill him.)

packistan could be the final resting place.

i think that the taliban lose a lot of people to winter weather and other non battlefield causes that we don't know about.

think about it, in really mountainous areas where there are only a few mountain passes the islamic terrorists hide there because it is quite hard to come and get them. well that also means that its quite hard to get out if our people block off the entrances.

look at these people waving their rifles. their clothing is thin and not particularly good for running over mountains in the dead of winter. you see pictures of them in snow in sandles. i would speculate that in packastan they probably lose a lot of people to frozen feet, hands, etc. that or they simply stay by the fire. so what is an army that stays by the fire? defeated.

our weapons are particularly good at long range. our guys can set up down in the nice warm valleys and destroy any thing up in the mountain pockets that they want to. and to find them air craft with infra red (temperature) sensors do quite well. the only way to dodge this situation is to hide in caves, but tora bora shows how that works.

C

Tom W,

His name was Rob Furlong and he holds the world record for longest confirmed kill with a sniper rifle during Operation Anaconda.

Wolfwalker wrote: It takes a very rare blend of command incompetence on one side and skill and luck on the other to produce such results.

Bingo. Historically, when American forces have drawn the enemy into a fight for which it was not prepared or trained, the enemy was devastated.

It really is not that hard. The key is to study the way the enemy thinks and trains, probe for weaknesses, and then formulate a means to draw the enemy into a fight on our terms.

So I am perfectly willing to accept- for a brief time- the current kill ratio. I'm also quite happy about the fact that our troops have drawn those Gomers out of their ratholes and into a killing zone.

Better Living through Superior Firepower.

wolfwalker :

I concur with your assessment. I believe your thoughts also apply to civilian deaths, which are probably exaggerated to a fault.

Remember this is a media war more than a military campaign.

It was a joint coalition-Afghan patrol not U.S. led, if there was any U.S. led if was from afar. It was a Canadian led patrol which lost one of their own. I know that is looks good to your reader but get the facts straight. I know that you think that you can do everything but you do need help from your friends.

marinecorpsvet:

May I very gently and without offense suggest that your conclusion-jumping was premature, given that it has no basis in fact? I lean to the conservative side on many issues, certainly on both this war and the Vietnam unpleasantness. If the kill numbers being given are accurate, then kudos to the guys on the ground and in the air who are doing the killing.

The reason for my question was this: long years of seeing the media distort its reporting on the war has left me with a permanent distrust of any report that suggests things are going disastrously for our side. However, I don't see any reason to assume that the same reporters and editors who so consistently get things wrong in one direction, can be trusted to get it right the other direction. Thus, I am suspicious of any report, whether good or bad, that seems to be out of line with what I expect to hear or read.

I was suspicious. So I aired my suspicions. And I got a couple of good and reasonable answers. That's all there was to it. No ulterior motives.

I frequently ask myself if one was dumb enough to believe that 72 virgins awaited him in heaven and he was too poor to (get any) anywhere else, or by virtue of the class system and arranged marriages to cousins etc.

How would martyring ones self look? A good deal to those dumb enough to buy it, thus dumb enough to rush a tank with an AK47?

Unfortunately they are smart enough to fool close to 1/2 of the politicians and general population in this country that they are winning.

Whose the dumbest?

Reminds me of all the bloated blather about Che Guevara and his "Guerrilla Warfare" acumen in the early 60's MSM. Ol' Che was always willing to "fight to the death", but it was always someone else's death, and had a knack for taking a 50:1 or worse loss ratio.

http://preview.tinyurl.com/3259mo

(links to Amazon.com: "Exposing the Real Che Guevara: And the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him" by Humberto Fontova)

Forget about generalship. It would seem that some of these Taliban groups don't have competent leadership at the Sergeant level.

fdcol63, I have also been wondering about the virgin problem. My conclusion is that paradise is only populated by an exponentially increasing number of females and an arithmetically increasing number of heroes. Either they kill all male babies at birth or they have done some genetic engineering to prevent male births.

^and have the intellectual level and nagging propensity of Helen Thomas.

Note to Muslame warriors ...

Here is the best strategy for beating US troops ...

"With a stick while they sleep" ...

Otherwise you may as well keep your weak a** "warriors" hearding goats and beating your women because face to face with real men you keep getting thumped ...

I think Interested Observor | September 26, 2007 9:33 AM has a very pertinent observation about Kitchener at Omdurman.

I dunno about the analogy with Omdurman.

That was the first time that Mahdi's army had encountered western troops. No CNN or traveling instructors to promote best practices.

These morons ought to know better, having had the opportunity to learn.

Don't get it.

wolfwalker,

I can believe it. I'm a soldier and have fought against these guys. They stink. They have almost NO knowledge of the fundamentals of combat, fire and maneuver, or how to use combined arms assets. In my time, it was like pitting the New England Patriots against the Smallville Jr High school JV team.

The mention above of the Battle of Omdurman reminded me of Belloc's sardonic little rhyme about the reality underlying Great Britain's imperial policy in his era:

"What ever happens, we have got
the Maxim gun. And they have not."

Isn't part of being a good sooper-dooper Muslim the ability to put yourself into a state where you BELIEVE totally that this time, the hand of Allah itself will reach down from the sky and slay the infidels?

If you don't believe that Allah will intercede, despite all previous demonstrations to the contrary where all your other little Muslim buddies have been annihilated, then you're a bad Muslim and are bound to die and *deserve* to die.

That's what the Wahhabi's have been preaching for years now, that Islam and the Middle East are in a state of decay because Muslims haven't been strict enough and hide-bound enough, and they need to find new ways of making themselves even stupider and more repressive and brutal to make up for it.

I know when we first went into Baghdad, Baghdad Bob was issuing statements where he was literally promising that "the hand of god" will smite the infidels, and I think he *literally* meant it - a big grubby nail-chewed paw would descend from heaven's clouds and smack the Americans like a bunch of ants.

You just know that Mullah Omar is tellng who-ever survives these set-to's that all they need to do to overcome is to scrunch up their eyes closed and really really really wish for success and victory hard ... like an audience for Peter Pan is told to wish Tinkerbelle back to life.

This is another in that long line of 10,000's of episodes confirming we can't be beat on the field.

Regretfully, we supporters of the men in combat are down to 35%.

These 7th century primitives are clearly 22nd century media savvy.

Occam's Razor holds that the simplest explanation for something is most likely to be the correct one, and it seems to me that the simplest explanation for the high kill ratio is this: The Taliban are realizing that their cause is lost, but they still want their 72 virgins. If they believed they could get those 72 virgins merely by jumping off the nearest cliff instead of staging futile suicide attacks against infidels, no doubt they'd do that instead. But they don't.

For those drawing parallels between Afghanistan and Vietnam, it might be instructive to remember North Vietnamese general Giap admitted in the '80s the US military's body count numbers were essentially accurate. We slaughtered them by the gross.

But the body count is no more meaningful now than it was then. The only way they can win this conflict is to convince the US public they already have, regardless of conditions on the ground.

Eric, I know your heart's in the right place and I hate to argue with you, but at least in the early stages of the Viet Nam war the US was drastically over-reporting enemy dead. One well known officer -- you'd recognize his name but I'd lose a friend if I identified him -- told a friend of mine after a major battle to report a kill for every enemy soldier he'd shot at. Even if every shot was a hit, which is unlikely, that policy would result in over-reporting every time two GI's shot at the same enemy soldier. On the other hand, I'm firmly convinced the DoD learned from the mistakes they made in Nam on that score and aren't playing the same game now. I don't find the 165:1 kill ratio at all suspicious; in the last few months we've gone from "Chase 'em off and forget 'em" to "Chase 'em off and let the flyboys hunt 'em down."

Bill Faith
Proud Viet Nam Vet

Anyone who has ever lived or worked on the ground in aid projects, training military, or tried to get third worlders to accept modern technology, see the world as it really is, or change backward ways can relate unbelievable tales of myopia and suicidally self-destructive behavior from such cultures and countries.
Despite the ravings of our moral relativist mindless lefty academic idiot moonbats infected with the pernicious poison that no culture or value system is superior to another the truth lies elswhere.
Third world countries are that largely because of their bad values, dysfunctional belief
systems, lack of ethics, and logic.
It's just that the values,ethics, and absence of true morality a fact manifested by the
insanely stupid actions of muslimes on the battlefield and the idiocy of third world tin pot dicators such as Casto, Chavez, the Zimbabwean genius. It's just that muslimes are the worst of the third world dysfunctionals.
The mad mullahs,imams, and ayotollahs rantings and insane raving pronouncements that the Judeo-Christian west is morally degenerate is proof that Freud and his followers were spot on about the tendency of the deranged to project their psychotic behaviors to others in a vain attempt
to ease their subconscious realization that
they are degenerates and the insane.
He who the gods would destroy are first driven mad.

Wanderer could not be more correct. One of the many inherent logical inconsistencies with modern PC thinking is just that bit where all cultures are equal and equally valid. So lefty brainwashed press ignore reality and carry on about third world prowess because of course they feel they are as advanced as us. Ever seen the casualty figures when the Germans fought the Russians in WW2? And the Russians were more modern comparitively to the Germans than the Taliban are compared to us. My favorite media example, which they never spoke of again afterwards, or apparently learned from, was in the leadup to Gulf War 1 where we heard over and over again about how the vaunted, battle-tested, elite Iraqi Republican Guard was Saddam's Waffen SS and oh boy, was the US Army in for it....well, we all saw that the US Army ran through them easier than the Germans through the French in 1940. One of the most one-sided campaigns in history. Wouldn't surprise me in the least if we killed Taliban like flies. At least the VC had defeated the French in combat before we started fighting them...