Taliban Stupidity
Personal Commentary
This won't be on Wired's "Ephemera" section for long:

It isn't the invasion of Normandy, exactly, but American special forces have arrived in southern Afghanistan and are reportedly operating in areas controlled by the Taliban. Initially, they'll be working with intelligence forces to try and undermine the Taliban regime although for their part, the Taliban seem unimpressed. "Fifteen or 20 troops will be able to do nothing," said Sohail Shaheen, a spokesman at the Taliban embassy in Pakistan. "If they want to send in soldiers, they should send in 100,000. Then it can be a fight between our soldiers and theirs."

This is wonderfully encouraging. Clearly, the Taliban has no friggen' clue about war, which is just the way we like it.

The entire point of the military is to focus force where it matters. Blanketing countries a la Dresden is in the past, where it can stay. Two or three people, if they could get in the right place, could probably take down the entire Taliban... simply by assassinating them all. Crude, but effective.

It would seem that nobody in the Taliban has played Civilization. (Perhaps we should airdrop millions of copies of Civilization and little computers to play it on to Afghanistan... it might teach them the importence of infrastructure in record time.)