I haven't made my mind up on this show yet. I can understand both points of view, but I think americas "blanket killings" are going to have the effect of drawing more people into the taliban, but on the other wise, why would you want to risk joining up with them in a war they clearly can not win.
It felt like a lot of stuff in that show was ommited on purpose which would probably sway the opinion massively in one side.
You think the Taliban cannot win? Guess again.
It's no sure fire win for the Talibs, at all, but neither is it for ISAF and all others over there.
Hell, people thought the Mujaheddeen didn't stand a chance when Ivan invaded. We all know how that went.
Right now the US and its allies are fighting an uphill battle against an opponent that is quite happy to die for its ideals. The avarage US soldier is rather less happy to die.
The Taliban have the huge advantage of being 100% able to blend into the population when you come looking for them. It's not a simple case of any man with a gun is a Taliban, men are given guns as birthday presents over there. It's safe to assume there is at least one in every household. This makes identifying your enemy rather difficult.
The US doesn't have the support of the local people. Far from it. They are losing the battle for the hearts and minds by the same stupid mistakes as in Vietnam. Besides that, what the avarage Afghan man wants is not that much unlike what the Taliban want. It is however a million miles from what the US wants.
Despite almost ten years of fighting, the country is far from pacified. In fact, it's getting more unsafe currently.
The vast technological edge the coalition has is of little use on the strategic level. It simply does them no good at all.
The problem is that after Vietnam, the US decided it would never fight a war like that again. So it started gearing up and training for a stand up fight and they did so spectacularly well, case in point being Desert Storm in '91. The problem is that because of this strategic philosophy, any lessons learned from Vietnam were ignored and discarded. Now they are just repeating the same mistakes again, since this is anything but a straight up fight. A war with an enemy like the Taliban, which does not adhere to normal military logic, a so-called low intensity conflict (LIC), should be fought with just that, low intensity. There is no sense in sending out tanks and IFV's to crush the sh*t out of anything that looks at you wrong, if what you need to do is get the support of the people. A conflict like that should be mostly handled by special forces. These men do much more than the flashy stuff like blowing holes in Osama, many of them dress like and live amongst the Afghans. They provide local medical aid, they teach the locals many things besides just fighting. Many of these guys grit their teeth when a full US division comes blasting through their area, because in a few short minutes, they will have wrecked what has taken years to build.
The problem is that special forces are just that, special. As such there are not many of them. So you will always need support from regular troops, but these people need to ditch their fortress mentality. Get out there, get in touch with the locals, help them and spend tons of time among them. The Dutch did this a lot when they were over there, I know the Brits do it, many others do it, but it only takes a few f*ck ups to undo all that hard work. The Dutch made some big mistakes in bombarding a few villages with our shiny, new PzH2000, the Brits probably made some mistakes too, but all that is dwarfed by the attitude of the avarage US serviceman. They will just blow the crap out of anything, brag about it and stick it on youtube. And the avarage Afghan will not really see the difference between the US forces and the other allies. They will just see foreigners...
So I wouldn't go putting money on the Taliban rolling over and playing dead just yet.
