Karzai urges Taliban talks before U.S. pullout
If our best buddy and man on the scene wants to talk with the Taliban, who are we to hamstring his efforts?
Like he isn’t hand-in-glove with them anyway.
Well sure, but by the calculus of victory expressed in this thread that makes our only logical option killing the guy, and starting over.
Perhaps something is wrong with that calculus?
So there are some Afghan womens’ rights activists who’d like us to leave and some who’d like us to stay, with the balance being such that if you were an American womens’ rights activist who was a little bit more clued up on the situation than your average person you’d think that if you met one of your Afghan opposite numbers you would reasonably expect them to favor US withdrawl.
Let’s say it would be worse for 50% of Afghan women if we stay and better for the other 50% if we don’t. It’s still pointless us being there, isn’t it? And we really don’t give a shit about womens’ rights there or anywhere else, it’s just another handy excuse we use for us to stay there.
SOMEWHAT badly treated? What constitutes truly bad treatment, in your book, then?
The only reason why there AREN’T death squads rounding up all women is because even the SOBs in the Taliban know that without some breeding women, there’s not gonna be a next generation of little Talibanists. As it is, women are killed out of hand because they dare to be women who are not accompanied by a male relative. If the Taliban had access to a method of cloning human males, they’d kill off all women and just start cloning boys.
The major thing missing in your calculation is that the war in Afghanistan is not primarily about the rights of women and girls. Their rights and welfare is an important matter, but subordinate to the mission of killing those who want to return Afghanistan to being a haven for Al Qaeda terrorists.
And as far as “we” don’t care about the welfare of women and girls, speak for yourself.
Your moral compass needs some work. Are you seriously lumping George Bush in with Hitler?
Actually, I have no idea what you’re saying here. Your ‘somewhat bad’ characterization of the Taliban was clearly intended to downplay just how terrible they are. Your bizarre inclusion of Hitler and George Bush is baffling - if you’re trying to compare the Taliban to Hitler, you’re not doing your own argument any favors. If you’re trying to lump George Bush together with them, in some grandly morally relativistic statement about how everyone’s kinda evil, then your argument breaks down into incoherence.
I see. So, you’ve managed to do enough moral flips and twists in your own brain to dismiss the subjugation of women in Afghanistan as just ‘human beings being human beings’. Is there ANYTHING you don’t declare as morally wrong? I mean, besides George Bush?
You might want to check up on your facts and your recent history. The U.S. HAS been talking with them. Since shortly after the invasion. The problem is, they’re pretty sticky on that whole woman subjugation thing. It’s part of their religious fanaticism. They aren’t willing to change. So you either throw Afghanistan’s women back to these monsters so they can be raped and murdered and have their schools destroyed and their teachers executed, or you stay there if for no other reason than give a lot of little girls the chance to be educated and grow up to have a life of their own and perhaps help moderate the poisonous political climate in that country.
Female Dissidents? Under the Taliban, no woman would dream of such a thing, because it would be instant death. And the entire country was a prison camp for women. The level of fear and subjugation they lived under was an order of magnitude greater than what blacks suffered under from Apartheid in South Africa. And I don’t say that to excuse apartheid, but to try to get through to you just how horrible it was.
Here’s an example of just how far women might go to be ‘dissidents’ - the Golden Needle Sewing Program, in which women went to a sewing class, but then engaged in such subversive activities as reading Shakespeare. For this, they faced execution if caught.
I see you’ll buy any crappy conspiracy theory so long as it pushes some of the correct political buttons for you, but when it’s convenient you’ll excuse anything under the banner of moral relativism. Nice.
You don’t know what you’re talking about. There certainly were roving enforcers of Islamic purity who rounded up women who were caught unveiled, or with unmarried men not of their family, or for any number of infractions. These women would be rounded up and summarily flogged or executed.
Seriously? You’re drawing a comparison to forced beard-wearing? You do know that women were forced to wear burkas, right? As in, being completely covered from head to toe?
Yeah, the Taliban killed a lot of men too. This somehow helps your position?
There aren’t any AQ terrorists in Afghanistan. Our own people say there are less than 100 foreign fighters in Afghanistan and they’re just jihadi guys, angry Muslims who want to fight the infidel and go to heaven. Any dangerous AQ people are living over the border in the territory of our ally Pakistan, or they’ve gone to Yemen, or Somalia, or Chad or the next emerging failed state. Or they’re living in the west. Our current stated aim is to support Afghanistan militarily and economically so that, if everything goes well, in two or three decades we’ll have built its institutions up to the level of those in Pakistan, the country where bin Laden currently lives.
And any actual dangerous terrorists aren’t the foreign illiterate religious conservatives running round Afghanistan with an AK 47 fighting for the Taliban, they’re western-educated western-visaed graduates who speak several languages and live in cities like Hamburg, Germany, like Mohammed Atta.
Please read my comments again. I said the US has a compelling national interest in not allowing Afghanistan to crumble into the hands of those groups who have been allied with Al Qaeda. I’m not sure how to respond to most of your comments which were based on something I didn’t say.
If your view of politics is that we should crush Pushtun nationalism and favor the Darrani political faction. Then yes, it’s a view that the war is unwinnable.
If on the other hand you have a realistic view of it, then you would recognize that making peace with the Taliban is a necessary step toward winning this war.
We cannot continue to wage war against a particular ethnicity and expect to win. Someone needs to read more political philosophy. Start with Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’. Then you can move on to any number of writings by British colonialists.
You were talking about how our mission there was to prevent Afghanistan again becoming a haven for AQ terrorists and my post was pointing out the silliness of this argument. I can understand why you’re not replying to the points I made.
And? What is your point here? Because Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women is so poor, yet they’re our allies, we have no right fighting against the Taliban? Because that’s how I’m understanding it.
Your ramblings about there being no Al Qaeda in Afghanistan do not address the point that the erstwhile Taliban government allowed AQ to set up training camps that trained people like Mohamed Atta for terrorist attacks around the world. The fact that he lived in Germany does not obviate the fact that that AQ used a safe haven to train and plot the 9/11 attack, and if Afghanistan were to become a safe haven again, the bad guys will return to wherever they can do their will without harassment.
Do you honestly think that Al Qaeda would not return to a safe haven in Afghanistan if they had the opportunity? Do you think the government of Afghanistan is currently able to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven if NATO left?
Also, when the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, it was seen as a major victory for the Mujahadeen, and directly led to the rise of fanaticism and hubris that caused the Taliban to behave so abysmally.
If the U.S. pulls out, it will be a propaganda coup for the extremist factions in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This will make them more aggressive.
Look - Afghanistan is a big tar baby. No doubt about it. I don’t see a path to victory. There’s no middle class to build up, no civil society to restore. But that’s not an excuse to just pack up and leave the women to the wolves and the terrain to terrorists. Sometimes you just have a really bad situation with no good outcomes, and all you can do is choose the least bad course of action. In this case, it means staying there. Probably for decades.
Maybe now some of you who carped for 8 years about how Afghanistan was the ‘right’ war and Iraq the wrong one can have an inkling of understanding of the logic behind going for Saddam - Afghanistan is intractable, so you try to change the conditions around it and try to remake the whole damned region. If all the Arab states could be pulled into the U.S.'s camp, the radicals in Afghanistan could be isolated.
This may still work, btw. Democracy is hanging on in Iraq. Iran is becoming more marginalized. The Obama Administration just announced it’s sending missile defense batteries to four middle-eastern countries to defend against Iran - A move I heartily approve of.
If you can’t turn Afghanistan into a modern nation, the next best strategy is to contain it while building conditions in the nations around it that erode the support for radicalism in the first place.
Atta first traveled to Afghanistan for military training, the Attas of today are going to Yemen, Somalia etc. Or they can still go to Afghanistan and pratice against the infidel. But he planned his operation in Hamburg, Germany.
When 9/11 happened you got a bunch of TV clips of jihadis running round obstace courses and swinging on monkey bars run on a loop 24/7.
http://nationalsquib.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/jihad.jpg
But those guys weren’t training to blow up the WTC, the guys who did that did their training in the west. The guys in Afghanistan were training to go and fight in Kashmir, Chechnya, Kosovo, and against the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. If they want to give terrorists (for whatever reason) military training then AQ can currently send them to Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia. There’ll always be a failed state that some kind of millitary camp can be set up in. If you’re going to invade Afghanistan to prevent terrorism you’re going to also have to invade Pakistan (impossible), Yemen, Somalia (didn’t work out too well the last time we went there), Chad etc. and future failed states in coming decades. There is no way at all you can prevent people getting military training somewhere and as for specific terrorist operations, forget it.
I think it’s eminently possible that AQ will return to Afghanistan in more numbers than are currently there but I think their presence would be irrelevant in terms of the overarching picture of jihadi groups in various states in Asia and Africa.
The muj’s actions after they kicked the Russians out actually led to the Taliban being formed to kick them out of power and restore some order to the country. The remnants of the muj are now our Afghan democratic partners in government.
Why do you think they are not going to Afghanistan anymore?
Fortunately, nobody is actually proposing that we invade every country where there are training camps. Except for Somalia, there are mostly functioning governments in the other places you mention, and many that you didn’t. We don’t have to invade and overthrow governments that don’t actually want Al Qaeda in their country, we are giving them assistance to get them to crack down on AQ themselves. It works better in some places than others.
If we withdrew from Afghanistan, everyone knows the government there would be ineffective and probably collapse quickly. That’s why we stay there, as Sam said, because it is the best of the worst options.
But tell me: if you are willing to disengage from every place where we have troops to fight AQ, or help others carry out the fight, which seems to be what you are proposing, what is your plan for these enemies of the United States?
President Obama’s Secret: Only 100 Al Qaeda Now in Afghanistan « RAWA News 100 Al Queda in Afghanistan, according to McChristal. How can Al Queada be a problem? The Taliba=n wants to set up a religious government in Afghanistan. they have no interest in America or Al Queada.
I’m not sure we’re talking about the same Taliban. Are you talking about those guys who gave Bin Laden safe haven before AND after the 9/11 attacks?
Actually, much as it irks me to say it (and agree with gonzo while disagreeing with you), I think gonzo has a point on this one. The Taliban probably DON’T give much of a damn about the US, at least here at home. They have bigger fish to fry locally and I’m sure that, if we left, they’d cheerfully go back to local tyranny, oppression and civil in-fighting and leave us to our own devices.
Of course, the problem or crux is that if they DO regain control of the country they will almost surely allow AQ the free hand it had in the country prior to 9/11…and THEY most definitely DO have a vested interest in continuing to attack us both abroad and here at home. The fact that they won’t really be able to fight us in Afghanistan if we tuck tail and bolt will probably mean they will either head back to Iraq or, more likely, find new and interesting ways to attack us elsewhere.
-XT