Told you so!

The Guardian reports that the Ministry of Defence is surprised:

"The defence secretary, Des Browne, today admitted that Britain and its Nato allies underestimated the strength of the Taliban and the violent resistance faced by western forces in Afghanistan.
He insisted he was not making a speech full of admissions of mistakes and that it was expected that the Taliban would fight hard but he added: "We do have to accept that it's been even harder than we expected."
His speech to the Royal United Services Institute in London comes amid a wave of violence in Afghanistan and concern over the scale and nature of the mission, which Mr Browne insisted today was for a "noble cause". Nineteen British soldiers have been killed in southern Afghanistan this month and a total of 40 have died there since November 2001.
Yesterday there was further bloodshed with three separate suicide attacks that killed 19 people. "The Taliban's tenacity in the face of massive losses has been a surprise, absorbing more of our effort than we predicted it would and consequently slowing progress on reconstruction," he said."

I don't know why anyone should be surprised. What has happened was entirely predictable. Indeed, I said so here in January:

"I have enormous sympathy for the British forces who are being asked to undertake a mission in which, successively, forces from the USSR and the USA failed. Indeed, it could be argued that the British Army itself failed in earlier centuries to bring peace and nation-building to Afghanistan.
If more than 100,000 troops from the coalition of the willing cannot pacify Iraq, what hope do the considerably fewer numbers of NATO and US troops have in Afghanistan?
And to those who ask - what is the alternative? - I have no answers. It would be nice to think that the current proposals would lead to a competent Afghan national army, as well as the elimination of the warlords, of the Taliban and of the narcotics industry, but it's not going to happen."