Winning in Afghanistan with the HIMARS

Good news, almost to the level of war ending good. yeah we all know the game, the US and partners goes in, drives them out, they come back, etc..... This time though it sounds like they really dealt a major blow.

ARGHANDAB, Afghanistan — American and Afghan forces have been routing the Taliban in much of Kandahar Province in recent weeks, forcing many hardened fighters, faced with the buildup of American forces, to flee strongholds they have held for years, NATO commanders, local Afghan officials and residents of the region said.

A series of civilian and military operations around the strategic southern province, made possible after a force of 12,000 American and NATO troops reached full strength here in the late summer, has persuaded Afghan and Western officials that the Taliban will have a hard time returning to areas they had controlled in the province that was their base.

Some of the gains seem to have come from a new mobile rocket that has pinpoint accuracy — like a small cruise missile — and has been used against the hideouts of insurgent commanders around Kandahar. That has forced many of them to retreat across the border into Pakistan. Disruption of their supply lines has made it harder for them to stage retaliatory strikes or suicide bombings, at least for the moment, officials and residents said.

The missile in question is quite effective and is launched by the The High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) has apparently been so effective hat the Taliban have been completely knocked off their game.

Of course you need to actually know where the Taliban are, and for that....

(Fred Kaplan, Slate)Along with the surge of troops and the shift toward much more aggressive attacks on insurgency strongholds (as reported here last week), Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has intensified intelligence-gathering operations to a still greater (though less-reported) extent.

The air over Afghanistan's heavy fighting spots is jammed with intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance devices—drones, towers, even blimps filled with various sensors. (One senior officer told me that the number of these blimps has soared from eight to 64 just in the last month.)

All this information is collected and interpreted by a growing number of imaging and intelligence analysts. Still more important, it's coordinated with information gathered on the ground by special-operations officers and—increasingly—by Afghan security forces, who are better able to gain the trust of local Afghans who dislike the Taliban.

According to a NATO officer, many of the Taliban's hideouts and strongholds are defended by a ring of improvised explosive devices. Therefore, the only way to take out some of these targets is with "smart bombs" dropped from the air or highly accurate artillery rockets fired from a distance. (Older-style artillery would be out of the question, as the first few rounds would unavoidably explode far from their targets and kill many civilians, since these targets tend to be in the middle of towns or cities.)

Good work.