In the other thread today I linked to the (rather flowery) piece by Anna Badkhen, which describes how the Taliban are slowly and rather silently move into and take the districts in the northern Afghan province Balkh, around the city of Mazar a Sharif.
On Sunday, a police official recited to me a grim roster. "As of 10:30 this morning, we no longer control the villages of Karaghuzhlah, Khairabad, Karshigak, Zadyan, Shingilabad, Joi Arab, Shahraq…." The list went on; the officer named about two dozen villages. Some of them quiver in diffraction only a few miles away from Mazar-e-Sharif, the provincial capital.
Four weeks after the Taliban announced the beginning of their annual spring offensive, the insurgents have quietly taken over most of Balkh.
What the Taliban are (again) implementing in Balkh, practically in the backyards of the German ISAF garrisons there, is a classic "Landsturm" campaign as envisioned by the often mentioned but little read German officer and strategist Carl von Clausewitz around 1810.
When Prussia, then still powerless, was threatened and later occupied by Napoleon's army, Clausewitz proposed to the king the "arming of the nation". This was a quite new concept as at that time usually only standing armies would fight each other. But the Prussian king did not like the concept of enabling the peasantry and instead signed a humbling peace deal with Napoleon. Clausewitz, incensed about this national treason, resigned from the Prussian army and joined the Russian one which was next on Naploeon's list. There he implemented his concept and it thoroughly defeated Napoleon's army.
C.v.Clausewitz, On War, Chapter 26 – Arming the Nation (this is one paragraph in the original here split for readability)
National levies and armed peasantry cannot and should not be employed against the main body of the enemy's army, or even against any considerable corps of the same, they must not attempt to crack the nut, they must only gnaw on the surface and the borders.
They should rise in the provinces situated at one of the sides of the theatre of war, and in which the assailant does not appear in force, in order to withdraw these provinces entirely from his influence. Where no enemy is to be found, there is no want of courage to oppose him, and at the example thus given, the mass of the neighboring population gradually takes fire. Thus the fire spreads as it does in heather, and reaching at last that part of the surface of the soil on which the aggressor is based, it seizes his lines of communication and preys upon the vital thread by which his existence is supported.
…
Armed peasants [..] when broken, disperse in all directions, for which no formal plan is required; through this circumstance, the march of every small body of troops in a mountainous, thickly wooded, or even broken country, becomes a service of a very dangerous character, for at any moment a combat may arise on the march; if in point of fact no armed bodies have even been seen for some time, yet the same peasants already driven off by the head of a column, may at any hour make their appearance in its rear.
If it is an object to destroy roads or to block up a defile; the means which outposts or detachments from an army can apply to that purpose, bear about the same relation to those furnished by a body of insurgent peasants, as the action of an automaton does to that of a human being.
The enemy has no other means to oppose to the action of national levies except that of detaching numerous parties to furnish escorts for convoys to occupy military stations, defiles, bridges, etc.
In proportion as the first efforts of the national levies are small, so the detachments sent out will be weak in numbers, from the repugnance to a great dispersion of forces; it is on these weak bodies that the fire of the national war usually first properly kindles itself, they are overpowered by numbers at some points, courage rises, the love of fighting gains strength, and the intensity of this struggle increases until the crisis approaches which is to decide the issue.
Disperse into the provinces, inflame the population, attack logistic routes and small patrols, coerce the occupier to disperse his force further and hit hard on those small dispersed elements. Rinse, repeat. It works. Remarkably and unlike in other cases Clausewitz provides no recipe against this strategy. There is none.
I find it somewhat ironic that the German (and U.S.) army will get kicked out of Afghanistan by an enemy that follows, by the book, the 200 years old ideas of the best known German military-strategic thinker.