1) The Afghan government's "strategy" - if you can call it that - appears to be to abandon so called remote and unimportant district and defend the major cities. This is recipe for failure, which I have written about for years. More below...
2) I wrote this in 2018: "While US and Afghan military officials have claimed that Afghanistan's remote areas are strategically insignificant, the Taliban has used its mastery of them as a springboard to take the fight to more populated areas." Cont... longwarjournal.org/archives/2018/…
3) "In these remote districts, the Taliban has established its shadow government, which it uses to spread its ideology and further its military aims. Here, the Taliban taxes the local populations, recruits fighters, establishes training camps and military stockpiles ..."
4) " ... while using these areas as staging points to attack neighboring districts. In the south, the Taliban controls and hotly contests a band of districts, panning from Ghazni and Zabul in the east all the way into Helmand, Nimruz, and Farah in the west ..."
5) "... that it uses to take the fight to the Afghan government. Over the past six months [in 2018], this safe haven was used to launch major incursions into Ghazni and Farah cities."
6) As you can see today, this is playing out just as I predicted. The Taliban has used the remote districts to expand its control, and now it is snowballing. The Afghan gov'ts "strategy" playing right into the Taliban's strengths. Afghan troops are demoralized and surrendering.
7) Many of the districts are falling to the taliban because the local security forces and government leaders recognize that the Afghan gov't can't or won't (or both) defend them.
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