The Taliban will never be fully defeated because the US isn’t willing to go all in on that hell hole.
The Russians were. They might have eventually killed all the Afghans, but they never came even close to defeating them. Maybe this is why:
kabed et-avikha v'et-imekha lema'an ya'arikhun yameikha al ha'adama asher-Adonai eloheikha noten lakh:
Or, in English:
Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.
Tribal cultures have a deep loyalty to each other and their land. They have established lines of communications, deep knowledge of terrain and the capabilities of their brethren, long practiced preparation for war, an understood chain of command...
In short, you may kill a tribal culture, but they're very hard to defeat. All the Afghans needed to defeat the Russians were relatively unsophisticated modern weapons.
Exactly. If we had gone all Hiroshima on them on Sept.12, 2001...we wouldn’t be having this discussion right now.
I agree with you that unless we stop trying to “win hearts and minds” and just show them who has the power to stop them, we can’t win. They are not interested in peace but only in power.