Thursday 23 August 2018

Operation Medusa: The Furious Battle That Saved Afghanistan from the Taliban -- David Fraser and Brian Hanington

Killing Taliban terrorists is like playing a game of Whac-A-Mole. It doesn't matter how many times you smash the mole -- in this case, the enemy Taliban -- making it scurry into its dark hiding place. It leaps up again somewhere else, as healthy and energetic as ever, ready to be chased and smacked down again. Like the mole, the Taliban is forever the malevolent underdog. Unlike the mole, it flies out of its hole with deadly force.
   Any soldier who fought the Taliban in the most recent of some 13 Afghanistan wars -- dating back to 1709 -- the one that commenced in October 2001, knows this game well. To this day it is being played out violently in that part of the world, almost two decades after the terrorist organization transformed itself into a murderous insurgency following its quick ouster as an ultra-oppressive Afghanistan government. The fundamentalist Islamic Taliban regime fell fast and early in the 2001 fighting -- which started less than a month following the 9/11 attacks on US soil -- and it "folded like a cheap lawn chair," according to one Ottawa writer, but unfortunately it has never been eradicated.