"Spring Offensive? Never heard of her...."

Yesterday, a Taliban "official" claimed that they have fired their first shots in a vaunted spring offensive:

Four U.S. soldiers were killed when their vehicle struck a land mine in central Afghanistan on Saturday, the military said. It was unclear whether the mine was freshly laid or a leftover from the country's long wars.

...Gov. Mohammed Aman Hamini said the incident occurred in a desert area crisscrossed by rough tracks.

"It's an old mine. There's no traffic on the route they took, but the Russians used to use it because they were afraid of the main road," Hamini said, referring to the Soviet troops that occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s.

However, Mullah Hakim Latifi, who claims to speak for the Taliban, said its fighters detonated the mine by remote control. "We've said again and again that we would resume our holy war in the spring," Latifi said from an undisclosed location.

Meanwhile, according to the March 26th entry at Strategypage, a significantly large number of Taliban have other ideas:

More Taliban are surrendering, and the government expects about a thousand to openly turn in their weapons and accept an amnesty. These surrenders also provide information on Taliban who are not surrendering. As a result of this, the government is turning more of its attention, and guns, to the drug gangs.

It looks as if Mullah Hakim Latifi was off playing "pin-the-burqa-on-the-jenny" when his compadres were passing out the memo to "end our misery of shivering in dank caves while getting plunked by the infidels like fat kids in dodgeball."

I guess anything could happend, but its highly likely that the Taliban's "spring offensive" will end up with all the other rhetorical Jihadi flourishes on the cutting room floor. See the other B-rate title that was all mouth and no action: "The Mother of All Battles."

UPDATE: For vested interests that will be revealed at a later date, Anthony Perez-Miller points me to a story that says that the four soldiers killed in the mine explosion were from the Indiana National Guard.

The investigation has found that the the mine that exploded was almost certainly left over during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Coalition patrols never used that road and would thus have never been mined.

Again, as with every soldier who is harmed in this fight, it is hard to find any words to convey the graditude that I have for their sacrifice, regardless of whether it happens because of an accident or by enemy fire.

Yet, the good news, as was the point of this post, shows that the Taliban are giving up and their Islamic jihad talk is just as hollow as it ever was.