The only thing that saved this unit was many of the soldiers had combat experience in Iraq. In other words nobody was a recent commissioned officer or weekend warrior and just saw combat for the first time. Not panicking and making the right snap decisions is what helped them maintain their composure and defeat the Taliban attackers. Despite the battle, the US military is alot quicker in making changes since then because the people in charge are at a wartime tempo, unlike the politicians and bureacrats in state side. I say get the assets from Iraq to Afghanistan ASAP.
There is one iron fact that often needs to be mentioned in Afghanistan.
There are 30,000,000 people in Afghanistan, and 111,000,000 people in Pakistan; and there are only about 100,000 total NATO forces, and 100,000 poorly trained Afghan army forces.
And while the enemy does not control the countryside, neither does the government. There is no nationalist sentiment, the country is ethnically divided, and half its porous border is shared with Pakistan.
Thus the only practical military goal is not to set up a stable regime, but to convince all the major factions to neither host the Taliban and al-Qaeda, nor to permit the export of terrorism in other ways.
Add to this that the majority of Afghanistan’s problems are external, for which we are to a great extent reliant on the will of the Pakistani government and military. And criminal, with the very high profit margin from the sale of heroin.
Militarily, this is a mess without any clean resolution.