altonacrude you wrote: "I notice that the Afghan Taliban have no requirement for any sort of helicopters, nor F-whatever fighter aircraft nor Abrams A-something tanks nor aircraft large enough to hold a sitting of federal parliament inside to ferry the tanks around because they are too heavy to travel by rail or road anywhere in the region. Yet the Taliban seem to be holding their own perfectly well without any of these."
A common fallacy that if we aren't deploying tanks/fighters we don't need them. If the Taliban could win in open battle they would, they can't because of the high end war fighting assets deployed by the US and others. The armour and air assets they owned previously have all been destroyed. They have the requirement they just cant fill it, so are left fighting a guerrilla war because that is all that is available to them. If they were able to engage in open warfare our casualties would be orders of magnitude higher. I wouldn't say they are holding their own so much as haven't yet been totally erradicated.