Posted by Bob,

I suspect that if Grant had focused solely on the defeat of Lee's army or the capture of Richmond that the war would have been much more likely to have devolved into a decades long insurgency.
Have to agree to this statement, the only way to convince the South to surrender was too make the cost of continuing the conflict too much to bear. The strategy was appropriate, and while we can only speculate I suspect it reduced suffering the long run by limiting the duration of the conventional war.

As stated by ganulv, the insurgency did continue. The militants were the KKK, the subversives were various politicians who inacted laws (which the local police enforced violently) that continued to oppress the recently freed slaves until MLK led a mostly peaceful and successful revolt against legal discrimination, and much as our development efforts continue to fail in Afghanistan, or development efforts in the South largely failed due to resistance to industrialization and other factors.

The south now is becoming an economic powerhouse in its own right, and blacks in the south have considerable political power (at least in the larger urban areas). What facilitated that transformation? That might be helpful in determining how to facilitate social and economic change in foreign nations (since we seem determined to do so).

Taking it back to the topic, Sherman's march helped bring the war to an end, but it didn't solve the core issues that the war was fought over. In my opinion, if we desire to defeat the Taliban, then we need to carry the fight into their safehaven and make the price of continuing war too costly. If that is politically infeasible, then we probably need to change our policy and associated objectives. If you want the military to win, then you have to accept that war is war and endure the ugliness that comes with it.

Sherman was no war criminal, he was a soldier that executed his mission very effectively. A tactical mission tied to strategic ends.