May I Have Your Autograph, Please, Mr. Taliban?

The next thing you know they’ll be on The View or maybe even Oprah.

Pakistan is talking to them, so is Afghanistan. The Saudis are always up for a chat with them. The Brits have exchanged pleasantries. Canada thinks it’s not a bad idea that someone talks with them and now even the Americans are toying with the idea of having them over for tea.

The Terrors of the Khyber Pass are the most popular bunch in town these days. Everybody wants to make nice. But wait, these are the insurgents, the bad guys, the widowmakers of Kandahar. Aren’t we supposed to be talking to them across open sights?

Welcome to the era of “if you can’t beat’em, try something, anything else.” Everybody is trying to find some deal sweet enough that even an Islamist fundamentalist can’t refuse.

Imagine what it must be like to be a Taliban leader these days. You have to decide which invitations you’re going to accept (presumably the ones with the best swag), what to wear, what hat goes with which shoes – these are tough things for a jihadi mountain man.

Now the trick is to always negotiate from a position of strength. Oh, that might be a problem for our side. You can’t find an American or NATO general these days willing to say we can beat them. They used to say that – a lot – they said it for years – and years – but no more, sigh. Now that they’ve decided it’s better for their careers to change course, it’s no longer just a military problem, no, no, no. Now it’s a political problem. In fact you just might notice that, when it comes to sitting down with these guys, there’s not a general to be seen from our side. No, that would be rude.

So, if you’re going to sell a deal, you have to have a deal to sell. We know they’re not bringing any deals to us. We’re the offeror, they’re the offeree. What have we got that they want? What do they want? What do they have that we want?

It’s obvious that we’d be happy if they stopped blowing up our convoys and shooting at people. We want them to “stop.” To make sure they don’t start again, we’d like them to integrate into the political structure of Afghanistan and of Pakistan. It would help no end if there was a viable political structure in either Afghanistan or Pakistan but you have to play the cards you’re dealt. I mean, let’s be realistic. What would you pay for a piece of the action at Hamid Karzai’s table? Probably even less than it’s worth and that’s hard to do when it’s worthless.

Reality sets in. We know we’re not going to land any sweetheart deals with the Taliban so we’ll leave that futile chinwag up to the Afghan, Pakistani and Saudi governments. What we want is to focus on the supposedly less-extreme parts of the Taliban, persuade them to defect. We’ll set them up on Easy Street and that will lure even more to come over. This way we’ll hollow out the insurgency.

It sounds like a plan – a very, very bad plan. To begin with, you never, ever let the other side know they’ve got the upper hand. You don’t let on that they’re winning. Well, that horse is already out of the barn. If we can’t control the insurgency – and we can’t – we can’t protect defectors, or their families, from retribution. The Taliban doesn’t get its support from playing nice, we know that. Given that the insurgents have already infiltrated the government and the police and the army, where’s a defector to hide?

“Too many cooks.” The Saudis and Afghans and Pakistanis are talking with the Taliban Head Office boys. If we Infidels start messing about with the Branch Office types, how well do you think that’s going to go down with the Taliban board of directors?

The Talibs have always said they would negotiate but only after US and NATO forces leave. Do we have some reason to believe they’re bluffing, that they’ll settle for less? If we don’t, we’re in an “A” or “B” situation and if we can’t break that, we’ll eventually have to accept it. We’ve pretty much known that all along. That’s the whole idea about establishing a strong, central government supported by a well-trained, well-equipped army. Now, if we were succeeding on the government thing and the army thing, we wouldn’t be talking about negotiations, would we? Of course not. We’d have them sew on their brigade patches, hand them the keys to the armoury and di di mau right out of there. Oops, sorry for the Vietnam reference.

No, my take on all these negotiations is that they’re a tacit admission of defeat, even fear. We haven’t done what we said we’d do when we went in there seven years ago. We haven’t even held the line. We haven’t succeeded on a single front over there, not one. Now we’re in a dilemma. The Taliban are not only resurgent in Afghanistan, able to operate pretty much as they chose wherever they chose, but they’re also destabilizing our key ally next door, Pakistan. And we don’t have anything in our fabulous, state-of-the-art bag of tricks to make it go away.

What would success from these negotiations look like? I figure if we could somehow get the Taliban to sever ties with al-Qaeda, that would be victory beyond what we deserve. We’ve spent the last seven years driving them into the arms of al-Qaeda so undoing what we’ve wrought would be a Herculean task. Still, al-Qaeda is an Arab outfit. It’s not Pashtun or Hazara or Uzbek or Tajik or Turkmen or Kurd or any of the other ethnic players in the region. They’re foreigners in a land that doesn’t particularly like foreigners. That may be enough to tip the scales.

Getting out of Afghanistan isn’t going to be pretty, no matter how these talks turn out.

 

We’ve Got a Whole Lot of Killing To Do

General Rick Hillier’s estimate of a “few dozen …scumbags” worth of Taliban in Kandahar province was always pretty stupid but now seems positively delusional. What was this guy thinking or was he even thinking at all?

Thanks to last Friday’s prison break in our very own Kandahar province, the Taliban came into a fresh force of 400-hardened fighters. Now I would’ve thought the insurgents would be pleased enough to spirit their comrades away for a bit of R&R in some distant, safe rear area. Apparently not.

Over the weekend DefMin Peter MacKay assured us it was all the Afghan’s fault that the Taliban were able to mass for an attack to overwhelm the major prison in our area and then get away, unmolested, with their liberated comrades. Terrible stuff, bad Afghans. He also assured reporters that Canadian forces were deploying in defence of Kandahar city.

Trouble is, no one told the Taliban that they were supposed to go to Kandahar city to duke it out. Instead they seem to have taken over a series of villages in a district north of Kandahar. From The Guardian:

“Around 500 Taliban fighters have taken over villages in Arghandab district, just north of Kandahar, Mohammad Farooq, the top official in the district, was quoted as saying by Associated Press.

The forces would be hard to remove from the strategically important area, a local tribal leader told the agency.

“All of Arghandab is made of orchards. The militants can easily hide and easily fight,” Haji Ikramullah Khan said. “During the Russian war, the Russians didn’t even occupy Arghandab, because when they fought here they suffered big casualties.”

This one has a bad smell to it. When these guys stand and fight against vastly superior, Western forces, there’s usually a solid reason for it.

By the way, Pete, remind me again just how much progress we’re making over there.

 

Taliban – Playing By The Book

Of course it’s not our book they’re using. Jonathan Landy of McClatchey Newspapers reports that the Taliban and al-Qaeda seem to have gone back to classic insurgency tactics, “…of avoiding U.S and NATO forces and staging attacks in provinces that haven’t seen major unrest and on easy targets such as aid organizations and poorly trained Afghan police.”

In essence, the insurgents are exploiting our main and possibly fatal weakness – our lack of numbers. We’re long on firepower but very, very short on soldiers and that means we can’t do the one thing our side has to do in this sort of conflict – secure the population.

Because we can’t secure the villagers against the Taliban, the insurgents are free to control these communities, running the show when we’re not there. Once your survival and that of your spouse and your kids depends on the whim of one side, the one that is constantly in your life, do you think you would support the other side, especially if you saw that other side, the government side, as corrupt and predatory anyway?

But aren’t these Taliban religious nutjobs? Sure they are but, in Afghanistan, who isn’t? Tribal peoples who pay fealty to warlords and hold sacred the right to sell their children might be excused for finding our values, our ways just a little curious. They may not like the Taliban any more than they like Kabul’s marauding police and security services but I’m sure they don’t see the Taliban anything like the way we see them. We just expect the Afghan people to see them the way we see them.

While the brilliant, pseudo-journalists of the National Spot may proclaim that we’ve got the Taliban “on the run” in fact they’ve just moved on to target NGOs and the police and bringing their war to new corners of Afghanistan.

“Operationally, the Taliban appear to be putting more resources into attacking in provinces where allied forces are weaker and which are less accustomed to clashes,” says an April 6 analysis written by John McCreary, a former senior intelligence analyst for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for dNovus RDI, a Texas-based contracting firm.

“They are starting to show the manifestations of a strategy” of keeping under-strength U.S. and NATO forces tied down in the south and east while stoking instability elsewhere, McCreary said in an interview.”

Spreading out of the south and east means moving out of the Pashtun homeland and into the turf of the supposedly rival Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazara – the Taliban’s mortal enemies, the former Northern Alliance. With different language, different customs, even different ethnicity than some of these other tribes, it’s hard to imagine how the Taliban could operate in these other territories without the support of these former enemies.

Is this the first sign of a Pan-Afghan insurgency, one in which NATO will be placed in the same spot as the former Soviet forces and the Kabul government of Karzai in the same, unenviable position as the former Marxist government?

In a nation built on a history of shifting alliances serving narrow self-interests, just about anything is possible. But, of course, we don’t see it that way.

 

The Good News: More Troops, The Bad News: Haqqani

Asia Times reports of the surfacing of a legendary mujahadeen long thought dead who has joined the Taliban to lead its spring offensive.

The guy is Jalaluddin Haqqani and his recently released video, coinciding with the NATO conference, is said to mark the unification of a network of resistance groups with Mullah Omar’s Taliban.

“Along with his son Sirajuddin, Jalaluddin Haqqani has built up a well-organized group, known as the Haqqani Network, with roots in Pakistan’s tribal areas, that, now firmly allied with Mullah Omar, will pose a dangerous challenge to the coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Haqqani soundly dismissed any notion – as touted by senior NATO officials – that the Taliban were weakened and might forego their spring offensive. “All 37 allies [in NATO] will be humiliated and driven out of Afghanistan – jihad is compulsory and will continue until the end of time; we are without resources, but we have the support of God.”

Haqqani said the Taliban and their allies in Afghanistan had come up with new plans to fight against NATO, but these did not have any room for reconciliation. “We are geared for war,” Haqqani stated.

The long speech by the Pashtun leader, who made his name fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and remains the most-respected tribal figure in southeastern Afghanistan, is the most sophisticated yet of the Taliban’s presentations to Pashtun people.

Copies of Haqqani’s speech have spread all over eastern Afghanistan and are available in various formats, including on cassette tape and through cell phone downloads. After being silent for so long, and having been reported dead on numerous occasions, the impact of people listening to Haqqani is immense and will undoubtedly work as a galvanizing force among Pashtuns.”

 

What Lurks Across the Border Inside Pakistan

Canadian journalists have generally done an abysmal job of covering the conflict in Afghanistan and events in neighbouring countries. The embedded scribes seem to be the worst. They either turn into a weird sort of Florence Nightingale with a keyboard or they’re reduce to parroting the litany of absurd claims that regularly issue forth from Canadian commanders.

Absurd? I wish I could recall how many times I’ve read some Colonel boast that we have the insurgents trapped here or there, leaving them to choose between surrender and death, only to have them vanish, in good order with their weapons, to come back and fight another day at a time and place of their choosing. According to the boss, the Big Cod, Hillier, there were only a “few dozen” insurgents in Kandahar when we went there. Well those few dozen must have an unlimited supply of lives given the casualties we claim to have inflicted on them.

It’s not surprising then that we are left to wallow in near total ignorance of what is actually going on across the border in Pakistan’s tribal lands. Military and political leaders freely state that this is the key to winning in Afghanistan. Every now and then one of them loudly proclaims the need to go in there and winkle out the terrorists. We regularly blame Islamabad for not doing enough. So just what is going on in the Pakistani border territories?

In the January 28th edition of The New Yorker, journalist Steve Coll has an excellent article on Benazir Bhutto which provides a fascinating window into the state of the “Tribal Lands.” Here are a few excerpts:

“…During 2004 and 2005, as the Taliban and Al Qaeda increased in strength in Pakistan, they carried out attacks on American and NATO forces in Afghanistan. The bush Administration urged President Musharraf to dispatch the Pakistani Army into South Waziristan to disrupt them, and Musharraf agreed to do so. The Army had never before entered the Tribal Areas to subdue them by force’ after British troops were defeated there, during the late imperial period, colonial and Pakistani governments had favored a system premised upon local autonomy. The invasion began poorly and has been deteriorating ever since; the Army has taken significant casualties, and, while its forces have killed or captured some Taliban leaders, they have also set off popular resentment.”

“…By late 2006, after sporadic battles that received little international attention, the Army had been, in essence, “militarily defeated” by the Taliban and Al qadea, as a US Defence Department official put it.”

“…Tariq Waseem Ghazi, a retired three-star general who served as Pakistan’s Defense secretary between 2005 and 2007, told me that, among Pakistan’s top commanders, ‘everybody felt there was a need for a political accommodation’ in the Tribal Areas. ‘I think it was unreasonable at any time that we should go into the Tribal Areas with the same kind of motivation and fervor with which the coalition went into Afghanistan or into Iraq’ he said. ‘…I kept telling them, Shock and Awe is fine for you if you fly in from the U.S. or Canada, but shock and awe is no good for us when we have to live with the Tribal Areas as a part and parcel of Pakistan.'”

“…Pakistan could have several motives in undertaking a covert program to aid or protect the Taliban: appeasing Pakistan’s radicalized Pashtun population; pressuring Afghanistan’s government into political concessions favorable to Pakistan; or preserving a historically friendly militia as a hedge against an eventual American withdrawal from Afghanistan.”

“…Shuja Nawaz, the military historian, said he doesn’t think that among the senior generals and intelligence officers ‘there’s any consensus that the Taliban are the enemy.; He explained, ‘so long as the Taliban don’t attack the Army, it sees them as perfectly fine. And, potentially, if they take over Afghanistan, it sees them as a group that would have at least some sympathies with Pakistan and vice versa.”

The good/bad news is that the Taliban and al Qaeda appear to be turning their attention, this year at least, away from Afghanistan and onto Islamabad instead. There is always some hope that this may shatter their support within the ranks of the Pakistani Army and its intelligence service. That, however, remains to be seen. Pakistan seems to be descending into a state of political, religious and military turmoil. Rather than pressuring Musharraf we may be better off doing everything we can to support him.

As for fanciful notions of going into the Tribal Lands and North West Frontier to clean out the Taliban and al-Qaeda, we’d better be prepared to go in with a much bigger force than we have in Afghanistan today and we’d better be ready, before we set foot in there, to accept very heavy losses for a very doubtful outcome.

 

What’s In a Name? Plenty and We Need to Understand That.

We’re just now finally coming to grips with the realities of Afghanistan’s ethnic melange but we also need to understand what’s next door, in Pakistan. The name gives it away.

The name of the country was crafted by a bunch of university students at England’s Cambridge. It’s an acronym. P for the Punjabis, A for the Afghans, K for the Kashmiris, S for Sind, and the “tan,” they say, for Baluchistan.

The country is essentially run by and for the military which is predominantly Punjabi. Benazir Bhutto and her ancestors belonged to the Sindhs. The Pashtun are blended into the Afghans and the Balochs are, of course, the tribesmen of the part of Balochistan that Pakistan shares with Afghanistan. Out of those five groups, the Punjabis and Sindhs vie for power. The others – Kashmiri, Pashtun and Baloch are beset by a variety of insurgents, terrorists and nationalist secessionists.

You don’t just go into one part of Pakistan to clean up insurgencies. You effectively take one side against one or more or even all of the others. If the Punjabis can’t bring order and security to the Baloch and Pashtun tribal lands, just what do we think NATO is going to accomplish? There’s a reason the Punjabi-run military keeps trying to negotiate ceasefires with these tribes.

So let’s drop the fanciful notions of bringing a little Western “know how” to sort out the tribal lands once and for all. That place isn’t like southern Afghanistan with its level, wide open spaces and largely passive farmers. The tribal lands are extremely rugged, mountainous territory. It’s the sort of terrain that doesn’t lend itself to armoured vehicles, artillery and air support, the high tech firepower we so depend upon. In fact it’s the sort of place where tanks and helicopters go to die.

By the way, another point of misunderstanding I’ve noticed popping up concerns Pakistan’s military. Some suggest they just need a few extra soldiers from NATO to drive the Taliban out of their country. Think again.

The Pakistani military consists of 602,000 active duty personnel. Add in the coast guard and paramilitaries and it just clears 1,000,000 in total. They’re all volunteers and they make up the 7th largest military in the world. They also have a reputation as very capable fighters. That’s the military that hasn’t been able to tame the tribal lands.

 

Militants Biting the Hand that Fed Them

Many of the violent events of the past several decades have come in the form of “blowback.” It’s a term that describes the potentially deadly plume of flame that blasts out of the backend when a shoulder-mounted rocket is fired. If you’re not careful, your own weapon can inadvertently kill you.

The al-Qaeda movement is blowback. The progeny of the United States and Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency, al-Qaeda was trained, equipped and funded to help drive the Soviet forces out of Afghanistan. Afterward al-Qaeda turned on its American benefactors and ever since then Rudy Guiliani has had 9/11 Tourette Syndrome.

Outfits like this are risky but that hasn’t stopped Pakistan’s ISI from continuing to play the game, especially using the militants to block Afghani collaboration with India.

Now even the Pakistanis are reeling from blowback. From the New York Times:

“Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency has lost control of some of the networks of Pakistani militants it has nurtured since the 1980s, and is now suffering the violent blowback of that policy, two former senior intelligence officials and other officials close to the agency say.

As the military has moved against them, the militants have turned on their former handlers, the officials said. Joining with other extremist groups, they have battled Pakistani security forces and helped militants carry out a record number of suicide attacks last year, including some aimed directly at army and intelligence units as well as prominent political figures, possibly even Benazir Bhutto.”

Does this mean that Pakistan, its military and the ISI are finally going to turn on the militants? Maybe but I suspect they’re as likely to wind up with some form of fresh accommodation involving the tribal lands adjacent to Afghanistan. The ISI has practised duplicity on a level that would make Machiavelli jealous and it’s difficult to imagine that agency going “straight” anytime soon.

 

Taking the Fight to the Taliban

That was the title of a BBC documentary on the Queen’s Company of the Grenadier Guards in Afghanistan that aired on CBC last night. It presented a troubling look at the Taliban, seen through a NATO gunsight.

The Brits are trying to control Helmand province just as Canada has responsibility for Kandahar province. Like Canada, the Brits are heavy on firepower and light on manpower.

The 90-minute documentary followed about 60-British soldiers patrolling for the Taliban. They found them. When the Brits fixed the insurgents’ positions, they brought in gunship helicopters, mortars, heavy machine guns and, finally, jet fighters to pulverize their hopelessly outgunned guerrilla adversaries.

What happened? Time after time the Brits called down the best of Western killing technology on the Taliban. They rocketed houses where the bad guys were sited. They even blew entire housing compounds completely to rubble with 500-pound bombs. They lobbed mortar rounds at them and raked their positions with heavy machine gun fire. It was spectacular. And then there was calm and the Brits and their Afghan army counterparts began to relax and walk around. Within minutes the Taliban opened up again, sending them scrambling for cover.

This happened over and over. They must have been killing the Taliban in large numbers but, each time, it was the Taliban who brought the fight back to the Brits, attacking their vastly superior enemies.

I was left wondering how a handful of insurgents, armed with only 50s vintage assault rifles and a few rocket-propelled grenades, could stand their ground, again and again, against such withering fire? Why didn’t they run?

Eventually sunset arrived and the Taliban did leave, on their own terms and with their weapons and casualties. When the Brits patrolled the area the following morning they found neither bodies nor abandoned weapons.

If this is the enemy we’re up against, we can get rid of any illusions about breaking these people. Rockets and bombs and artillery aren’t going to decide this conflict. I think we’d better figure out a new approach.

 

Pakistan’s Taliban

“When planning a military expedition into Pashtun tribal areas, the first thing you must plan is your retreat. All expeditions into this area sooner or later end in retreat under fire.”

So wrote British general, Andrew Skeen, in the early 1900s in his guide to military operations in the Pashtun tribal belt.

While NATO and the US are fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, so is the Pakistani army in the tribal lands of North and South Waziristan along the Afghan border. Taking the fight to the Pakistani Taliban is of critical importance to NATO. It’s about the only means of denying the Afghan Talibs safe sanctuary to muster their forces and support operations in Afghanistan. So, how is the Pakistani army making out? According to the New York Times, about as well as one might expect:

The only consistent reports of offensive action by the Pakistani Army involve the use of helicopter gunships and artillery to attack militant compounds. Aerial assaults, when carried out without support from “boots on the ground,” serve but one purpose: they help sustain the illusion that the Pakistani government is taking effective action.

The truth is that the soldiers have lost the will to fight. Reports in the Indian press, based on information from the very competent Indian intelligence agencies, describe a Pakistani Army in disarray in the tribal areas. Troops are deserting and often refusing to fight their “Muslim brothers.”

Nothing illustrated this apathy more clearly than the capture of hundreds of troops in August by the Taliban warlord Baitullah Mehsud with nary a shot fired in resistance.”

So, what are the options? Throw more money at Islamabad? If money would do the trick it would have worked by now. Stop throwing money at Islamabad? No one’s sure how that would turn out. Invade Pakistan? Please, we can’t handle the job in Afghanistan. We’re already grossly understrength. Where would we find the tens of thousands of soldiers that would be needed to repeat the Victorian British blunders in the Khyber?

That’s what we’re up against, seemingly insoluble challenges. It’s not that the Taliban are better fighters than our troops, they’re not. Our soldiers are better, they’ve got vastly better weapons and support technologies, they have better communications and total air superiority, better mobility. So why can’t we just mop the floor with these backward warriors?

The Taliban have a number of advantages we’ve not been able to neutralize. One of them is in recruiting. Afghanistan is dirt poor but the insurgents have access to narco-bucks from the country’s booming opium trade. This allows them to “hire” recruits. However there’s another way they get support and that draws on their fiercely-held tribal code of Pashtunwali, particularly Mla Tarr. This requires all members of a man’s family capable of carrying a gun to rise up when he’s attacked. It’s sort of a “kill one, get three free” plan.

The insurgents also have the “home turf” advantage. They have nowhere else to go, nothing else to fight for and, in fact, they’re fighting for everything they have, their homeland. For the Pashtun, whether it’s the half in Pakistan or the half in Afghanistan, the Taliban are the home team. Even Karzai, the country’s president and himself a Pashtun, knows it.

We have the tactical advantage in firepower and technology – useful for fighting a tactical battle. The insurgents have the strategic advantage of time, as much time as it takes to keep wearing us down until we get tired and frustrated enough to leave. Put simply, their strategic advantage trumps our tactical advantage in the long run.

So General Skeen knew a century ago what our leaders have yet to understand. We can kill these people until we can’t find any more bullets and then we leave. If the powerful Pakistani army can’t control the Pashtun of Waziristan, all we’re doing in Afghanistan is blowing smoke.

 

America’s Shakey Assessment of Afghanistan

To listen to Peter MacKay and some Canadian generals, we’re making solid progress in Afghanistan. That’s the problem with listening to Peter MacKay and his generals. They can’t afford to tell you how miserably “the mission” is faltering.

But, when it comes to tall tales you can expect the tallest to come from the Americans. So, what’s their take on Afghanistan? According to the Washington Post, it’s not nearly as rosey as the line coming out of Ottawa:

…the latest assessment [of the National Security Council] concluded that only “the kinetic piece” — individual battles against Taliban fighters — has shown substantial progress, while improvements in the other areas continue to lag, a senior administration official said.

This judgment reflects sharp differences between US military and intelligence officials on where the Afghan war is headed. Intelligence analysts acknowledge the battlefield victories, but they highlight the Taliban’s unchallenged expansion into new territory, an increase in opium poppy cultivation and the weakness of the government of President Hamid Karzai as signs that the war effort is deteriorating.

The contrasting views echo repeated internal disagreements over the Iraq war: While the military finds success in a virtually unbroken line of tactical achievements, intelligence officials worry about a looming strategic failure.

But one senior intelligence official, who like others interviewed was not authorized to discuss Afghanistan on the record, said such gains are fleeting. “One can point to a lot of indicators that are positive . . . where we go out there and achieve our objectives and kill bad guys,” the official said. But the extremists, he added, seem to have little trouble finding replacements.

Although growing numbers of foreigners — primarily Pakistanis — are joining the Taliban ranks, several officials said the primary source of new recruits remains disaffected Afghans fearful of opposing the Taliban and increasingly disillusioned with their own government. Overall, “there doesn’t seem to be a lot of progress being made. . . . I would think that from [the Taliban] standpoint, things are looking decent,” the intelligence official said.

Senior White House officials privately express pessimism about Afghanistan.

At the moment, several officials said, their concern is focused far more on the domestic situation in Afghanistan, where increasing numbers are losing faith in Karzai’s government in Kabul. According to a survey released last month by the Asia Foundation, 79 percent of Afghans felt that the government does not care what they think, while 69 percent felt that it is not acceptable to publicly criticize the government.

Gee, does anyone remember another conflict not all that long ago where America won every battle but finished up losing the war?