100 Militants Killed in Huge Afghan Battle, NATO Says

NATO forces said Tuesday they had killed more that 100 fighters in a huge weekend battle in eastern Afghanistan in which eight Americans died, the deadliest firefight for U.S. troops in more than a year.

The revised enemy death toll gives an idea of the scale of the battle, one of the biggest of the eight-year-old war, in which hundreds of fighters armed with machine guns, rifles and rocket-propelled grenades attempted to storm remote outposts.

Read the whole story: Reuters

Comments

[XPat Lib]

04:16 AM on 10/07/2009

As a Viet Nam vet I'm amazed that we seem to be operating in the same way in Afghanistan. Firebase outposts in remote areas that get attacked and/or overrun by several hundred enemy. Have we learned nothing in the past 40 years on how to fight insurgents on foreign soil — or, better yet, how NOT to fight them? There must be a better way to do this.

[GrumpyGrandpa]

12:18 PM on 10/06/2009

As the whole Afghanistan situation deteriorates, I keep getting flashbacks to another time, another place, another war. I am old enough to have first-hand memories of the Viet Nam war. In that war, one of the supposed ways that the 'morale' of the voters in the US (and demoralizing the enemy) was to have been kept high and supportive of the war or low and anti-war for the enemy was an inflatable body count. After awhile, it became obvious that our 'body count' would have killed every North Vietnamese person several times over. I am beginning to have the same concerns about a war that more and more takes on the characteristics of that previous war. We have/had a local population that views us as invaders/occupiers, we are/were propping up a corrupt government, we are/were using conventional war tactics against an enemy whose sole tactic is no tactics (guerrilla warfare), and the 'enemy' has/had much more experience fighting foreign militaries on their soil than we do.
So generals, this is a different war in a different time. Explain to me how that is at all relevant to the decision to stay or go.