Why is it so hard for US/NATO to crush insurgency in Afghan?

[Blanquist]

Why can't they just buy-out the moderates and crush the hard-liners?

I really don't know many details of this conflict. Is the Pakistani state supporting the Talins?

[Os Cangaceiros]

Back when the British were still messing around in Afghanistan, they noted that Afghans generally seemed to share two characteristics: they tended to be 1) Muslim, and 2) intensely xenophobic. They didn't want foreigners involved in their national affairs at all. That's a large part of what sustained many resistance movements against foreign occupiers...against the Tajiks; against the British; against the USSR; against the Americans; etc.

There's cultural aspects like badal/melmastia (badal is basically equivalent to "vendetta", aka if a wrong is done to you by another, you're sworn to retaliate, and melmastia is the duty of hosts to protect their guests or those who turn to them for protection. Americans would encounter this and be flustered by the fact that they could not pry any information about bin Laden in the aftermath of the invasion of Afghanistan, despite the fact that the inhabitants of Afghanistan were mired in grinding poverty and the bounty was 25 million dollars).

Then there's the enormous fact that Pakistan's intelligence services are aiding the Afghan Taliban.

And also the fact that American forces do things like burn Korans and commit massacres against civilians.

Etc etc etc!

[Brosa Luxemburg]

The U.S. and NATO are using traditional military tactics and are fighting an enemy using untraditional tactics (whether it be guerrilla warfare, suicide terrorism, etc.). In all honesty, the U.S. probably could have won the Vietnam war if it was a small scale special forces operation.

Also the U.S. and NATO are creating more terrorists and terrorist sympathizers than they are killing off.

It is just speculation as to whether Pakistan supports the Taliban in Afghanistan, but it should be known that the Taliban in Pakistan (which is allied with Al-Qaeda) is different from the Taliban in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban, while they probably sympathize with each other, are (according to all intelligence information) not working together now. The Taliban are a nationalist movement that wants to establish an Islamist regime in Afghanistan, not the world. Al-Qaeda is the international group, but recent intelligence says that the support for this group is faltering and as long as the U.S. has a foreign policy that breeds terrorism, than their will continue to be supporters and members of these groups.

EDIT: While it is only speculation as to whether Pakistan is aiding the Afghan Taliban, in all likelihood they probably are.

[Os Cangaceiros]

I mean, most people just want a little stability in their lives, I think, especially in war-torn regions. The Taliban, as sordid as they are, are probably in the best place to offer this stability...people in Afghanistan still remember the hellish situation unleashed by the warlords in the 90's. A similar situation took place in Somalia, until the short-lived Islamic Courts Union managed to wrest some control from the warlords and established some stability. The ICU was driven from power by Ethiopia at the behest of the USA, though, and now we have al-Shabaab. Supposedly Somalis in Mogadishu look back at the ICU period somewhat nostalgically, as the Muslim militants would attack government forces (who were basically armed looters) who would raid food markets.

[Brosa Luxemburg]

I think it's funny that the PDP, probably one of the only forces in the country in modern history that had the chance of industrializing and modernizing the country, was crushed by the United States by funding the same Islamic extremists that would fight us.

Then we support the Northern Alliance and a loose group of warlords after we go into Afghanistan and that group is so much worse than the Taliban.

Goddamit, fuck the war...

[OnlyCommunistYouKnow]

If there's no one to fight, then the United States loses its reason for being in the middle east.

[ВАЛТЕР]

You can't keep a nation under your boot so long as the population is motivated to keep you out. In all areas the Wehrmacht was superior to the Yugoslav partisans, yet the Partisans mopped the floor with them. Why? Because the Partisans were fanatical in their beliefs that they can win, and that they will win. So of course they did win. Countless times they outfought the Germans, even though they sustained massive losses they kept fighting. From day one up until the last fascist was subdued.

[marl]

The environment and landscape of Afghanistan also makes it very hard to crush the Taliban.

[TheGodlessUtopian]

Imperialism isn't adapted to handling unconventional tactics; they ready to handle conventional warfare in a situation where there is infrastructure which can deny the enemy means of resistance. The Taliban are not a centralized group: many within the group are under their banner solely for aid in imperialist resistance (many different agendas exist) and as the Taliban are well funded it makes most sense to align under them for most equipment and funding.

Once funding has been accomplished it is just a simple matter of defending the supply routes (easy considering the size and terrain of Afghanistan) and there can be many Taliban cells in villages which conduct hit and run attacks against American forces. The Taliban operate in each sympathetic village, not as a highly centralized agency looking at waging conventional war.

It is also important to remember that many individuals who attack Western forces in Afghanistan are not actually affiliated with the Taliban and simply get lumped in with the Taliban as part as the Western fear-mongering (I.E "Today "X" amount of Taliban were killed in the "Y" province"). So, while the Taliban are large they are not the only armed group fighting against Western Imperialism.