A moment of cyberspace silence —            — as today marks the beginning of Year Six of war.

The slow-burning fuse of quagmire.

The prospect of a second downward spiral – though so far Afghanistan isn’t nearly as violent as Iraq – has experts worried that Western militaries don’t have an effective strategy for these irregular wars.

“One Iraq is bad enough,” said Bruce Hoffman, a counterinsurgency expert at Georgetown University. “Given that our two main theaters of operations aren’t going well, one has to question how well the U.S. understands counterinsurgency.”

[snip]

Resemblances to Iraq don’t stop there. Taliban public relations teams videotape attacks and post them online, an uncharacteristic venture into modern technology for a Muslim fundamentalist group that once banned cameras and computers.

[snip]

The Taliban comeback, while focused on the volatile south and east, has begun to hit Kabul. The mountain capital’s tree-lined boulevards are now scarred, like the streets of Baghdad, by garlands of razor wire, towering blast walls and impromptu police checkpoints.

There’s little indication that Iraqi insurgents are joining the fight in Afghanistan or giving the Taliban direct aid, although a few Arab and Chechen fighters mingle in Taliban ranks.

But even without much personal contact, the Taliban has learned from Iraq’s insurgency. Web sites explain the insurgent’s art: everything from concealed rocket launchers to roadside bomb-making.

“We’re not saying they’re getting direct support from Iraq,” a U.S. military official in Afghanistan said on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity the information. “They’ve evolved by adapting their tactics. They’ve seen the value of the suicide bomber in Iraq. For them, it’s a very cheap and effective weapons system.”

The U.S. and NATO military response in Afghanistan also has nuanced differences from Iraq. U.S. warplanes drop 10 times more bombs in Afghanistan than they do in Iraq, and a few U.S. and NATO troops live off base in village houses, a strategy rarely attempted in Iraq.

But most of the allied war efforts looks similar. In both places, troops cordon off villages and search homes. They employ billions of dollars in technology – things like signal jammers and mine-clearing vehicles – to find and disarm roadside bombs. They operate from bases nearly identical in appearance, with troops living in tin trailers barricaded by dirt-filled metal baskets. Article