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Make the enemy howl and there’ll be no need to hamstring our military trying to win hearts and minds. Sorry, that’s never worked.

The "hearts and minds" of which you speak is actually the only way you will ever "win" a small war. Doing what you suggest as "doing what you need to do to break the enemy's will" only generates more hatred and hard feelings against your force, in addition to handing the enemy an info-war victory that they hold up against you.

Winning the support of the population is a critical component of any small war, without their support you have no inside knowledge of the opposition organization, you don't know who the bad guys even are until they point a gun at you, in other words, its one of your foundation points in your COIN strategy.

Believe it or not, it works. There are plenty of Afghans who are helping us over there, they tell us where the IED's are, they tell us when groups of bad guys are moving through the hills to infiltrate, obviously we don't get them all, but we do get quite a lot, however they are getting discouraged with the lack of progress, the Taliban seems to be gaining the momentum and that hurts us.

Part of the reason I think we haven't "won" there yet is that we haven't finished the job. Back in 2007 we were fighting aggressively in Helmand, the Taliban was on the run, then we backed off, we gave them breathing room to regroup and re-arm and now we're paying the price for it. If we're going to have any chance of peace or security in Afghanistan we need to get back into Helmand in force to finish the job (there is a big difference in legitimate offensive operations and trying to win hearts and minds.

The people there live under Taliban rule, they support them because they have no choice (support us or die), we need to get back down there and crush the fight out of the Taliban, but it'll be bloody, and I don't think there is the political will to do it, which is sad because we might as well not even have gone in if we're not going to finish.

I don’t agree with you on that. Germany was not “defeated” in WWI and that led to the rise of Hitler. Germany was defeated decisively in WWII. Hearts and minds can come after you defeat an enemy not before. The same thing happens continually in the Balkans. Non-decisive endings lead to simmering tensions that eventually boil over into full blown warfare.

Another example is the Middle East. Every time Israel is about to defeat their enemies, the US and the West handcuff them and the Muslims are able to claim they weren’t defeated which eventually leads to another round of fighting.

Sure, we can use a divide and conquer strategy and we should. It worked for Caesar and it would work in Afganistan but you need to be the “strong horse” for them to follow since they will turn on a “weak horse”.

I'm not so sure about that. From people I know who've spent time there, the typical Afghani villager hasn't stepped outside their realm of a few km their whole life. They know and trust their family, other close families and neighboring villages, possibly. It really isn't a matter of 'winning their hearts and minds' but rather getting them to place you farther down on the list of the people/groups they hate most.

In that regard, this is not as daunting a task as changing them ideologically; it's a matter of finding out what fills their immediate needs and fulfilling it. But this is really just a form of sustaining poverty like we do here in this country. You can't win because you can't keep it up - the cost of this, along with other nations [and there are plenty] is more than this country can afford.

Eventually, someone - another country/group - is going to come along when our support slacks and get put farther down on that hate list than us. And, the cycle starts again.