Taliban Killing US Hearts-And-Minds Strategy

Didn't we win the post-war war in Iraq by winning the hearts and minds of the Sunnis?  Yes, we had to arm them to the teeth and pay the warlords a Hedge Fund CEO-level... stipend, but they came to love America and their Shiite brothers and sisters.  Sunnis even vote now.

So, off to Afghanistan we took this strategy.  Hearts and Minds, people.  That will win Afghanistan.  Forget the occasional stray HMA Rocket or Predator Hellfire missile taking out a village or two.  Enlist the Afghans to clean up that mess of a bazaar (we had to bomb just last year) by paying them with real afghanis (a currency worth about 2 cents).  That'll make them love us in Afghanistan, too.

So we battled to take Marja, a Taliban stronghold.  Once we did that, we set about romancing (that means paying) its inhabitants.

But we have run into the unexpected.  We're paying a bunch of Talibanners, too.  Do they go out and buy bread and jam with their afghanis?  They do not.  They buy IED's and rocket propelled grenades. 

So why pay the Talibanners in the first place?

Because, for the first time ever, we can't tell a Talibanner from Afghan.  Damned if they don't look alike.  They even wear the same clothes and walk the same way.  They shake your hand like an Afghan.  Who would have guessed?

Have we ever had a war where the enemy looked like the people?  Think about it.  The enemy usually looks completely different.  Sometimes, they have uniforms that are gray or blue, like in our Civil War (Or War To Keep Our Slaves Ours, depending on your address).  Other times, they have orange horns growing out of their foreheads.  Some look just like the Kracken in "Clash of the Titans" (pick your version).  One of them, for sure, had only one eye, like the Cyclops in the pre-2000 graphic novel "The Odyssey".  But we definitely have always been able to tell an enemy at 100 plus yards, making them an easy target for our laser-approximating bombs.

The American military is stymied by this radical development.  A guy walking down the street with an AK-47 could be the local grocer or sandal vendor.  Or he could be a Talibaner.  Maybe all three.

Worse, the Talibanners, looking like the familiar foreigner-invader-loving Afghans, are killing off the foreigner-invader-loving Afghans and suggesting to others that foreigner-invader-loving is generally best done on foreign soil.  Somehow, the Talibanners can tell the differences and don't kill their own guys (and they are all guys, by the way), by mistake every fortnight or so.  How can they tell and we can't?

We all were assured that  our military had taken Marja and freed it of its Talibaner interlopers. We were well on our way to daily hugs, parliamentary elections and poppy-laced tea with the locals...

Oh.