They are both. Win what? Anyone who knew about what they did in the mid 90s wouldn't forget the savage brute phase of their existence. Tens of thousands dead in Kabul alone. They looked like a bunch of ragtag losers after that, too.
I remember soon after 9-11 speculating that the country couldn't be overrun and held without mechanized infantry (and the US, for all its firepower and for all its equipment purchases, has inadequate air transport for even relatively lightweight mechanized infantry) .
The NA has hidden behind US air cover and then with some minimal mechanized infantry and a few tanks (and like the Taliban, trucks and cars) overrun and held much of the country. Looks like they got Russian and Iranian equipment to do so.
They still aren't a credible fighting force to my mind. Take away US air cover and the only thing they are good for is killing each other, prisoners of war, and civilians.
But who are they fighting? Next it will be themselves or the pissed off Pashtuns and/or both. The US can't extricate itself fully, quickly--no, this is no police and run action--because it can't cede control of such a strategic area to Iran, China, and Russia and its client states.
>The Taliban (and Al Queda?) was
>slowly taking over
>the Pakistani military and Pakistani >society. In other words, the
>cancer that
>Pakistani intelligence had inflicted upon >Afghanistan was
>metastasizing
>back into Pakistan.
I suppose that was one of the calculations that people like Powell made. Force Pakistan to reverse course and welcome them back into the US client state fold. And no doubt the dressing down the Saudis are getting is over how they failed to be good US proxies in this area.
I don't know about the cancer metaphor. Most likely only to the extent that Pashtun militants were feeding Islamicized militant sentiment over into Kashmir. Even in the minds of their most comitted leaders, I can't imagine the Taliban dreaming of taking on the US. Their biggest dreamers probably wanted a Sunni arc from w. Iran across to Kashmir.
If either the people on the Afghan border or a newly Talibanized Kashmir (even after all the help they got) tried to disagree with the Pakistan government and military, they'd get the treatment the Baluchistanis got--wiped out.
It's been agreed now that Afghanistan must be shared. Well, let the sharing begin.
Charles Jannuzi