Afghan insurgents 'on brink of defeat'

By Thomas Harding in Lashkar Gah

Last Updated: 10:31PM BST 01/06/2008

Missions by special forces and air strikes by unmanned drones have "decapitated" the Taliban and brought the war in Afghanistan to a "tipping point", the commander of British forces has said.

The new "precise, surgical" tactics have killed scores of insurgent leaders and made it extremely difficult for Pakistan-based Taliban leaders to prosecute the campaign, according to Brig Mark Carleton-Smith.

In the past two years an estimated 7,000 Taliban have been killed, the majority in southern and eastern Afghanistan. But it is the "very effective targeted decapitation operations" that have removed "several echelons of commanders".

This in turn has left the insurgents on the brink of defeat, the head of Task Force Helmand said.

So please explain WHY George Bush has retreated philosophically from those policies which obliterated the Afghan safe haven of the mass murderers, and overturned the Taliban, then destroyed one of the most heinous dictatorships on the planet, and allowed a totally different page of history a chance in Iraq AND in Afghanistan, where history stopped in 850 AD?

Is he impressed by all the foreign editorials?

What?

It's as if Grant had stopped after Cold Harbor and Spotsylvania because the casualties caused him ill regard.