Intelligence, Intelligence, Intelligence

No, I am not talking about how smart someone should be, though there is smarts needed regarding Afghanistan, but knowledge of how your enemy plans and acts, who they are, and where they are at any given time, etc.

When you have a populace as diverse, spread out, unknown as the Afghanistani's are, waging an insurrectionist war is doubly difficult. Gathering intelligence under these conditions is at best uncertain and when your troops lives are at stake you have to have good intelligence. Having the upper hand with mobility, strength, logistics is worthless if you don't know where and who your enemy is. Add in the isolation of much of the populace, where strangers would stand out like a sore thumb, gathering good intelligence would be a nightmare. How do you tell if someone is Taliban if the populace is sympathetic, or at best cowed, to the Taliban cause?

Is 30,000 more troops going to mean better intelligence? I think not. It is like shooting a target in the dark.