Uh oh. Bad news from the front in Afghanistan.
Yesterday Great Fat Leader was going on and on in the hot Australian sun about how we can't abandon the poor Afghans.
Today it looks as if the poor Afghans are preparing to abandon us.
The mayor of Kabul wants to talk to the Taliban. And the Taliban want to talk to him. And make politics not war.
They feel the time is right for a shift in the organization's primary goal - from endless war with U.S. and Afghan forces, to legitimized political power in large sections of the country.
Hurrah we've won!!!!!!!!!
Or have we?
.....a top Taliban commander, one of the 30 members of the Supreme Council, tells CBS News that most of the members believe the group is in a "strong position" to negotiate a deal that would see them take on administrative control of several provinces in southern and southeastern Afghanistan.
Oh no. You don't think that means where WE are? I wonder how many girls will go to the schools we built...... in the places the Taliban administer?
Or will it just be one madrassah after the other....funded by the same crazy wahhabi sect that brought you 9/11... raising little boys to be suicide bombers?
What did our soldiers fight and kill and die for anyway? I guess Taliban Jack was the only Canadian political leader smart enough to know how this war would end.
Once it was a tragedy.
Now it's a farce....
3 comments:
I agree we should take a dim view of a bunch of reactionary old mysoginists cutting some deal among them, but I think this is good news, generally.
The Taliban is a spent force. They've been defeated, militarily. All they're good at now is IEDs and sending mentally handicapped boys into markets with bomb belts on, and most of the Taliban leadership even want to give that up. The Taliban are on the ropes. They're a joke. The Afghan people are sick of them.
Layton was wrong on his "let's negotiate" stance because a) if we'd taken that approach, the Taliban wouldn't be groveling for mercy right now, b) it isn't up to us to negotiate with the Taliban anyway; we're nopt the government there c) Karzai's been clear all along that he's happy to negotiotiate the Taliban's surrender, and d) thousands of mujahadeen had negotiated their way into Canadian-funded retraining programs long before Layton had anything to say on the subject.
So I think this is pretty good.
The good guys are winning.
Hi Terry!! As usual I hope you're right.I hope that their battle field losses HAVE brought them to the negotiating table.Or even more importantly that they are turning against Al Qaeda as some of the Sunnis in Iraq are doing. Because that could be HUGE. But I can't help but wonder if this is a temporary situation brought about by the fact that the Pushtun in Pakistan are more engaged with the Musharraf regime these days than they are with their kin in Afghanistan. Two...I don't believe we can hope for an end to the suicide bombers until something is done to control the madrassahs that not only riddle border town like Quetta (more than 150 so far and counting) or the ones springing up in Afghanistan itself funded by the crazy Wahhabis. Three..I'm not sure I can trust Karzai not to give away the shop...especially when Pushtun loyalty joins forces with the drug cartels.
But my Scottishness makes me naturally gloomy...and as you know if I'm wrong nobody will be happier than me... :)
Sometimes I have to keep my optimism about these things in check. . . what would we do without you sensible Scots?
It's so tragic, really. Everything so many brave people have managed to win in Afghanistan could be lost in a heartbeat.
As for the peril of negotiations with the Taliban, nobody's put it better than Lauryn Oates:
http://tinyurl.com/22pvld
Speaking of bullies - terrific post about those high school kids, by the way. And it looks like we should be cranking up the volume again about Alavaro. I'll do what I can.
- t
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