Sunday, March 7, 2010

Darwinian Evolution, COIN-style

Thirty-six hours ago (Saturday morning), one of Operations Officers mentioned that there was fighting up north in Baghlan Province.

Yeah? And your point would be? There's hardly a province in Afghanistan that doesn't see some level of violence on a daily basis. Baghlan is by no means immune to that.

Except, here's the thing: the fighting was not between the Taliban and ISAF, or the Taliban and ANSF. So, was it Hezb-i-Islami Gulbuddin (HiG) fighting the government, or international forces? Nope.

Instead, Hezb-i-Islami Gulbuddin (HiG) had decided to duke it out with the Taliban, apparently over the rights to tax some isolated villages. (BBC story here).

When the bad guys start killing the bad guys, I make a point to stop whatever I'm doing and smile for a minute or two.

3 comments:

James G said...

I used to hear the same things in Iraq, someone would be like “Did you hear that there was fighting in Blah, blah…”. I was always like “Thanks for the news flash but dude, where in Iraq isn’t there fighting?”

~James G

Matt said...

That is awesome. I love it when the bad guys kill each other. It will be really cool if Adam Gadahn was really captured today.

PaladinSix said...

According to one of my guys who has "friends" in the Pakistani ISI, the capture of Gadahn is for real. However, it wouldn't be the first time the ISI spread bullshit around for their own purposes.

The Pakistanis never liked Gadahan anyway, since the fact that he is an American citizen brought too much attention to their unwillingness to address the problem.