In regards to an Afghan "Surge"...
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Spotted this while downloading some music and thought it was interesting.
And not to piggyback out of the blue onto Matty's musings about a Stan Surge but I believe that should we happen across a Petraeus Clone, this might help his battle staff (the J-3 especially) get started on making some plans about where they want to start concentrating their efforts... (h/t Bill at The LWJ)
The southern, southeastern, and eastern regions, all which border Pakistan, experience 73 percent of the Taliban-inspired violence in Afghanistan. Kunar, Kandahar, Khost, Nangarhar, and Paktia provinces, all of which border Pakistan, experience the most Taliban-driven attacks in Afghanistan.
I spent my time operating in Paktika and Paktia, which were pretty violent while I was there, so I can attest to the numbers there. I only visited Ghazni Province (where we rescued a Czech official and his party) and Khost (convoy escorts), but the fellas from the 10th Mountain could testify to those numbers in Kunar, Jalalabad, Asadabad (where they get rocketed constantly), and it is a great war story to tell about the 3 mile long ambush they drove through in Kandahar Province (only heard about it and talked to a Captain who was there). I listened one day while laid up in an ORP over my TACSAT as the 10th Mountain in Paktika was rocketed constantly for an hour and a half by the Taliban.
Rest assured however, that attack did not go unanswered.
I won't bore everyone with statistics, pie charts, bar graphs and numbers (Matty has probably had enough of these from his advanced statistics class project), but the article has an excellent breakdown on all this information.
Kunar, which borders Pakistan's Bajaur province, an al Qaeda command-and-control hub, is Afghanistan's most dangerous province.
It is an excellent breakdown of where we need to send those 3,200 Marines to Kunar to "flood the zone" and it would be really great to hear about the bombing of "an Al-Qaeda Command and Control hub" very soon.
I am smiling just thinking about it....