Is everything over there a Potemkin Village?

What gave it away that they were actors playing Taliban?

"Hokay, so the plan wasnt super-bad-ass. Let me buy you a Heineken"

Talibani: Don't shoot! Musa Khan hired us to be actors and play surrender.
Musa Khan: I did not.
Talibani: We have paystubs.
Musa Khan: Oh yeah, they're "actors" and I hired them to "play surrender"
that's the ticket. How emarassing. Imagine if they had been real bad guys sent here to kill the US ambassador. That would have been bad. Well, we have that all cleared up. You can let them go now. Sorry about that.

How about flaying Musa Khan alive and saying THIS is how we treat people who can't deal with the paperwork. Now go kill the taliban or we will kill you, and then we will kill the taliban.

What the fark is so hard about killing talibani?
Why even hold someone who is acting like one.
Just shoot them in the head.
This is why we are losing.
We're not killing them as fast as they breed/recruit
You need to kill them faster than they can breed/recruit.
You need to do it without prejudice, or you are not a warrior and you will not win.

*pfft*

Joe: [looks through binoculars] One of the terrorists is trying to tell us something.
Gary: [waving the distress signal towards Joe and Chris] It's me! It's me!
Joe: Looks like he's saying, "Kiss me! Kiss me!"
Chris: Smart-ass motherfarker!
[fires missile at terrorist jeep]

Hot, like simulated puppet sex:

"The whole thing was like a play," said Qazi Sahib Shah, a member of Ghazni's provincial council. "These were not real Taliban ready to make peace. The governor was trying to fool the Americans."

This pretty much describes the entire Afghan war.

Fark.
These.
Guys.

You're not going to bring a country with a seventh-century mindset into even the 18th-, let alone 21st-, century mindset in a few years. Get the hell out and leave them to their fate. We've lost enough blood and money. Even if we did succeed... we get to claim Afghanistan as a progressive society? Whoop de farking doo.

"Donor nations have poured $142 million into an Afghan-run fund to provide fighters with jobs and other incentives, but barely one-fifth has been spent because of administrative hurdles and political foot-dragging. Even less has trickled down to the provinces, where local officials say they can't promise sufficient work opportunities or protection for the former insurgents."

dnrtfa, but Pakistan by any chance?

I'm hoping the recent BBC documentary Secret Pakistan (new window) gets some play in the states.