[smokingfrog]

“tribal militia”

Yeah, just some local yokels trying to keep the neighborhood safe.

[EDINVA]

not local yokels, community organizers.

Prayers for the soldiers and their families. Our young men and women should not be sent into harm’s way without full support, and definitely not with ‘rules of engagement’ that will surely end up with more totally unnecessary deaths.

[Prospero]

As so many of us are, again, focusing on Afghanistan I was inspired by her remarkable appearance on CSPAN-2, late Sunday morning, to visit the site of Dr. Kimberly Kagan's Institute for the Study of War, and from reading the remarkable and detailed reports from Michael Yon and as anyone can see in schematic at understandingwar.org, the "Tally-Bhan" may well be "quick to take credit," but Mullah Omar has his hands full controlling the night (and collecting taxes on the poppies for his well-paid troops) in the Afghan South.

To the extent that Americans are (or were) deployed in the Afghan West, they are fighting Iran, and not Mullah Omar's "Tally-Bhan."

This is a fact Americans should keep in mind, just as the fact that more Americans were probably KIA in Iraq before the present lull, at the hands of Iranian elements than they were locals.

In the "fog of war," mistaking the AP reports for the ground truth in this battlefield would be very similar to mistaking the Viet Cong for an insurgency instead of the NVA elements that they, in fact, were (until the former were wiped out by the U.S. and the collapse of their Tet offensive in 1968).

We have been at war with Iran since they stormed our embassy in 1979.