Raymond Millen
2009-01-14 19:21:15
I’m on my third tour in Afghanistan and study the insurgency here daily. The flaw in the author’s thesis is the assumption that al Qaeda, the Taliban, et al have a master strategy. They don’t. They aren’t even a coherent organization. These organizations are a hodgepodge of small groups, doing whatever they want. One cannot create a strategy to combat intellectual chaos. The only ones who think the Taliban are geniuses are the journalists, few of which possess the intellect to report factually on the conflict here. As far as the war effort goes, as an old Army colleague paraphrasing Napoleon told me, “It’s not the best armies that win wars, it’s the ones the make the fewest mistakes.”
