The successful offensive relied on several factors.
Intelligence was the biggest reason. The additional UAVs, intel aircraft and intelligence analysts reaching Afghanistan in the last year have made their mark. Much more is known about the enemy, and the foe can be monitored 24/7 when necessary. The Taliban were surprised at the speed and accuracy of the attacks, and how follow up raids, based on just captured information, were carried out. This was all possible because of good intelligence, that was constantly updated. All these operations were also carried out with little or no publicity. The troops, and the smart munitions, were just suddenly there. Few protracted firefights. Just a lot of initial noise, and then a systematic clean up.
Cell phones are very common throughout Kandahar province. While more tips are coming in from disgruntled Afghans (who are getting tired of the Taliban, even if they are the home team), the Taliban are also very reliant on them. Now the Taliban are well aware of the fact that the Americans can tap into cell phone networks, but too many Taliban use them freely anyway. Smart phones are particularly popular, and newly recruited Taliban will often blow their first month's pay on one, and then do all sorts of stuff with their new toy, providing American intel analysts with lots of useful information. This drives the Taliban leaders nuts, but you know how it is with kids and their toys.
Precision weapons are being used more often, even with the more restrictive ROE (Rules of Engagement). The better intel about Taliban hideouts made it more possible to hit targets that did not have local civilians rounded up as human shields. With NATO troops on the move a lot, more Taliban were flushed out into the open. Thus, last month, warplanes made 700 attacks with smart bombs, missiles or cannon fire (more than twice as many as were made in September 2009). Add to that hundred of attack helicopter and UAV attacks, and you have some three dozen attacks a day (and these were often at night). In addition, the American soldiers and marines fired hundreds of GPS guided rockets and 155mm artillery shells. These were particularly unnerving for the Taliban, because they came without any warning. You can often spot a warplane or UAV up in the sky, and head for cover. But the guided 227mm rockets just hit, within a few meters of the aiming point, and could take down an entire compound.
Air mobility allowed assault troops to bypass roads well covered with mines and roadside bombs. The Taliban planned on these roads to slow down approaching troops so that a proper getaway could be organized. Not so when the helicopters came in at night, sometimes after a few smart bombs or guided rockets had hit.
Defeat of the IED (Improvised Explosive Device, the bombs and mines) has deprived the Taliban of their main weapon. Last month, 1,320 IEDs were encountered by NATO and Afghan forces. Most were destroyed, disarmed or simply marked and avoided. Less than 14 percent of them went off, killing 24 foreign troops. It was a repeat of what happened in Iraq, with American troops neutralizing enemy IED tactics faster than those tactics could be modified and improved.
Kandahar has a population of 950,000, about half of it in the city of Kandahar. It's the homeland of the most important Taliban leaders, and many of their early followers. It's second to adjacent Helmand province in opium and heroin production. These two province produce most of the world's heroin.
The Taliban didn't just get hammered in Kandahar, but all across southern Afghanistan, and in those areas of the north where there has been some Taliban activity. A lot of this anti-Taliban activity has actually been aimed at the drug operations the Taliban guard. The heroin gangs have had a bad year, what with a fungus that wiped out half the opium crop, and more attacks on labs (that turn opium into heroin) and caches of drugs and smuggling operations in general. No wonder the Taliban are trying to negotiate a peace deal.
Banditry has always been a big problem in Afghanistan.
There has never been an effective national police force, and army operations merely caused the bandits to scatter back to their villages.
The basic problem is that there is not one Afghanistan, but hundreds. Each tribe and warlord has its own army which polices its neighborhood. Everything outside that area is considered potentially hostile territory. Men are free to go outside the tribal area and become bandits. Loot taken in battle (or armed robbery) has always been a big deal in Pushtun tribal culture.
So while most Afghans can understand the usefulness of keeping the main road from Kabul to Kandahar open, many of those same Afghans condone their kinsmen robbing people on that highway, as long as it's done to "strangers" (not from our tribe or, even better, foreigners.)
While a lot of Afghans, especially those living in urban areas, try to get away from these medieval attitudes, the majority of those in the countryside are more traditional in their attitudes. This is where a lot of the violence comes from.
Journalists tend to blame it all on the "Taliban," but in fact, most of it is just those gun totting country boys doing what they've always done. More are on the payroll of some drug gang, than a Taliban outfit.
Life would be so much easier, so the conventional wisdom goes, if peace could be obtained by just destroying the "Taliban." But the real enemy is a set of cultural attitudes that aid and abet the lawlessness. It's a much more elusive target.
Cities like Kabul have become very different parts of Afghanistan. You see lots of women without veils (even as Western media report "Taliban terror creeping into Kabul"), and men without beards. Videos and music are freely available, as are alcoholic drinks.
A lot of these city slickers are fresh from the country, where the restrictive lifestyle of "tradition" continues to drive the more adventurous away. This is the sort of thing that offends tribal and religious leaders. These guys don't want change, because it tends to mean less power and money for them. That's why the Taliban has such a following in the countryside, and not in the cities.
News reports about Pakistani troops exchanging fire with NATO and U.S. helicopters at the border appear to be more stories than news. Many of the border guards (a force recruited from local tribes) are pro-Taliban (or on the Taliban payroll), and quick to fire on aircraft and any armed men they are not familiar with.
That's been going on for decades, and was the cause of tension with the Russians in the 1980s.
Real violence between Pakistan and the United States is unlikely, because the U.S. is the major financial and military supplier for Pakistan. Thus without U.S. support, military upgrades don't happen and the economy tanks. Religion is one thing, defense and economics are something else (that is more important to more Pakistanis).
Meanwhile, the government makes the right noises about "defending Pakistan's borders" while doing nothing to actually interfere with American operations on either side of the border.
Over 20,000 Pushtuns have fled from Pakistan into Afghanistan to avoid the violence between Taliban gunmen and the Pakistani army.
The Pakistani Taliban are under attack in several areas (Waziristan, Swat Valley and Bajaur) and losing in all of them. The head of the Pakistani Taliban has just died, after being ill for several months, leaving behind a power struggle. The Pakistani Taliban is in disarray and falling apart. This is being felt in Afghanistan, where fewer "volunteers" are coming across to help out the Taliban there.
In the face of this, the Afghan Taliban say they will keep fighting throughout the Winter. NATO responds by announcing another Winter offensive. This will get interesting, because NATO forces are more mobile in Winter.
Traditionally, Afghans stay indoors during the Winter. Getting a chill can be fatal, and the rain, snow and ice make it difficult to get around.
The government has again openly called for Taliban leader Mullah Omar to come negotiate with the government. This comes in the wake of several years worth of successful negotiations with lower level Taliban leaders.
Many of these guys have left the Taliban as a result. There are also reports, denied by the government, that Saudi Arabia is sponsoring secret peace talks between the government and the Taliban.
One has to ask, why would the Taliban want to negotiate? Put simply, while the drug gangs are doing well (despite heroin production falling 20 percent from last year), the Taliban are on everyone's hit list, and are taking a lot of hits.
Now defeated al Qaeda operatives are moving in from Iraq and elsewhere, and blowing people up. That generates more hostility than support, and this hurts the Taliban as well.
Within the Taliban, a debate is on over how to deal with the lack of progress. The Taliban have been able to generate more violence, and dire headlines in the West, but not much else.
True believers are getting discouraged.
U.S. and NATO commanders believe they can largely shut down the Taliban and al Qaeda if they have some more troops. The U.S. has agreed to send three more brigades next year. NATO nations, urged on by France, are trying to muster more troops for Afghanistan.
By next year, changes in Pakistan, and growing attacks on Afghan drug gangs are expected to weaken the Taliban even more.
The new government in Pakistan is behind the recent army offensives against the Taliban, and has just replaced the head of their intelligence agency, the ISI, which originally invented the Taliban back in the 1990s.
The ISI has long been full of Islamic conservatives, but the new head is different. How different will become apparent by early next year.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban are trying out a lot of new tactics, trying to find something that works. The recent prison break in Kandahar worked, but partly because the government had been sloppy, and had ignored NATO warnings, over a year ago, about security vulnerabilities in that jail. Two suicide bombers and a few dozen gunmen got nearly a thousand prisoners out of the jail. There's also suspicion that there was some inside help. That, alas, is quite common in Afghanistan.
But elsewhere, the new Taliban ideas have been failures. Shortly after the jail break incident, nearly 500 Taliban rode into a dozen villages south of Kandahar, took control of ten villages, and basically challenged the government to do something about it. The government, and some NATO troops quickly did so, and the Taliban troops were promptly driven out, with about half of them being killed, wounded or captured.
The Taliban have brought over 10,000 gunmen into the country from Pakistan. They have learned to bring most of these guys in as civilians, because the millions of dollars the Taliban are earning by "taxing" the drug gangs, enables them to buy weapons in Afghanistan for their Pakistani recruits. Most of these kids, and a lot of them are teenagers, recruited from religious schools, are pretty green. They have been studying the Koran for the last year or so, not how to move around the hills and fire a weapon. But these youngsters do have religion, and that makes it easy to use them as enforcers for the lifestyle rules the Taliban wants to impose. That means all women are covered up when outdoors, do not work outside the home, and don't go to school. For the men, no barbers, no music, no videos, no booze, no sex before marriage, not much fun at all. Many of these kids only use their guns to bully Afghan civilians. When faced with Afghan or NATO troops, the Pakistanis tend to quickly die, or flee, or both.
Even with all this effort, the overall casualty rate so far this year has been less than half what it was last year. The Taliban are active this year, but so more it's mostly smoke, and not a lot of fire. It's the NATO and government forces that are on the offensive this year, and the Taliban is desperate to change this embarrassing state of affairs.
