Michael Yon emails with this cautiously optimistic note:
President Obama’s decision to send more troops is popular among the troops here. And for the first time I see a real fighting chance emerging. Though sharply increased fighting should be expected, there are cracks in the Taliban. They are not invincible and we can beat them, and finally I believe we probably actually will. (Touch wood, and pass the ammo…)
If you followed Yon’s reporting in Iraq you knew about the civil war months before the MSM or the government talked about it, and you also knew we had won months before anybody else. He has been warning for a long time that Afghanistan was being lost, so this is very big news indeed.
He’s got a short dispatch up. And, if you’re on Twitter, you should follow him there at twitter.com/Michael_Yon. He posts lots of interesting mini dispatches there. Last night, for example, he tweeted about several attacks we’ve made on Taliban IED emplacement teams where the Tali left bodies and equipment behind; something they don’t usually do. “So I asked COL Tunnell for his assessment about why Taliban abandoned what they normally take. COL Tunnell thinks their network is damaged.”