Damn, I wish you were around to educate the Taliban fighters on that point! You could have saved the US military a whole lot of trouble. Obviously, the civilians will never beat the regular military, but they can / will become very painful speed bumps. If you arm a small % of your civilians, the normal military is left with 3 options: - Discriminate mass slaughter of all civilians (which Russia obviously doesn't want) - Grind away at it and turn a large portion of military into a policing force. Door to door raids, working with informants, etc. - Retreat US keeps trying #2 and never has great success and eventually goes with option #3.