Air power works against you, not for you. It kills lots of people who werenâ??t your enemy, recruiting their relatives, friends and fellow tribesmen to become your enemies. In this kind of war, bombers are as useful as 42 cm. siege mortars.

Big, noisy, offensives, launched with lots of warning, achieve nothing. The enemy just goes to ground while you pass on through, and heâ??s still there when you leave. Big Pushes are the opposite of the â??ink blotâ?? strategy, which is the only thing that works, when anything can.

Putting the Big Push together with lots of bombing in Afghanistanâ??s Pashtun country means we end up fighting most if not all of the Pashtun. In Afghan wars, the Pashtun always win in the end.

Quisling governments fail because they cannot achieve legitimacy.

You need closure, but your guerilla enemy doesnâ??t. He not only can fight until Doomsday, he intends to do just thatâ??if not you, then someone else.

The bigger the operations you have to undertake, the more surely your enemy is winning.

And more - as Lind quotes from expert Chet Richards in his forthcoming book "Neither Shall The Sword":

war is terrorism, so a â??war on terrorismâ?? is a war on war. We are not in a war on â??terrorismâ?? or engaged in a â??struggle against violent extremism.â?? Instead, we are faced with an evolutionary development in armed conflict, a â??fourth generationâ?? of warfare that is different from and much more serious than â??terrorismâ??â?¦

to see the difference between 4GW and â??terrorism,â?? run this simple thought experiment: suppose bin Laden and al-Qaida were able to enforce their program on the Middle East, but they succeeded without the deliberate killing of one more American civilian. The entire Middle East turns hostile, Israel is destroyed, and gas goes up to $15 per gallon when it is available. Bin Ladenâ??s 4GW campaign succeeds, but without terrorism. Do you feel better?

This applies to situations like Iraq and Afghanistan:

Itâ??s not a war followed by a blown peace. That is conventional war thinking, even if the war is waged and quickly won by 3GW. Instead, it will be an occupation against some degree of resistance, followed by the real, fourth generation war.

Personally, I may be a leftie but I'm not a pacifist. I would love to see the war in Afghanistan a success despite the diversion into the Iraqi quagmire. I've a notion that the correct strategy lies in going exactly the other way in applying assymetric force. Assasinate terrorist leaders and those who support them from positions of state or popular power. Those individuals who lead, support and advocate terror only and no others. No civilian casualties to fuel the next round of hate.

Let the terrorists be the only ones to ever mass-kill innocents and even many who support them will change their minds about that support, gradually removing their power base of generational hatred. Back that up with a genuinely universal foreign policy of ethical intervention and aid (hearts and minds) and the effect will be multiplied. Between the two, it would even dampen down, through both positive and negative reinforcement, the process of replacing the terrorist leaders and the leaders who enable them.

The West has the tools - highly trained special forces and intelligence units. No person is safe from a trained and motivated assasin. But don't use bombs and artillery - they just aren't accurate enough, even when "precision" is prefixed to their names by the advertising blurb.

Should this mean threats of reciprocity - killing of the West's leaders and reciprocal advocates of genocide - then let those people declare "bring it on". Let them too have the courage to face the bullet from afar. (Isn't the dream of the common man to have the two leaders in a conflict fight it out as champions without a multitude of peasants' deaths? This would be as close to it as we are likely to get.)

Should any nation descend into chaos because its entire leadership class has been removed then - as the neocons never cease to remind us - not all medicine tastes nice. Which is prefereable, a chaos where inimical strongmen are still around to help guide the chaos along to their own ends or one where a true "hearts and minds" policy can soften the blow, shorten the interregnum and help the blameless innocent choose a decent path for their nation free of the machinations of terrorist leaders and their enablers?

Regards, Cernig

Pakistan: The Taliban’s Silent PartnerBy James Joyner Robert Kaplan reports that the government of U.S. “ally” Pakistan is behind the steady resurgence of the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan.WHEN the American-led coalition invaded Afghanistan ...