Posted on 12/06/2016 12:11:26 PM PST by Theoria
Fifteen years, half a trillion dollars and 150,000 lives since going to war, the United States is trying to extricate itself from Afghanistan. Afghans are being left to fight their own fight. A surging Taliban insurgency, meanwhile, is flush with a new inflow of money.
With their nation’s future at stake, Afghan leaders have renewed a plea to one power that may hold the key to whether their country can cling to democracy or succumbs to the Taliban. But that power is not the United States.
It is Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia is critical because of its unique position in the Afghan conflict: It is on both sides.
A longtime ally of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia has backed Islamabad’s promotion of the Taliban. Over the years, wealthy Saudi sheikhs and rich philanthropists have also stoked the war by privately financing the insurgents. Continue reading the main story
All the while, Saudi Arabia has officially, if coolly, supported the American mission and the Afghan government and even secretly sued for peace in clandestine negotiations on their behalf.
The contradictions are hardly accidental. Rather, they balance conflicting needs within the kingdom, pursued through both official policy and private initiative.
The dual tracks allow Saudi officials plausibly to deny official support for the Taliban, even as they have turned a blind eye to private funding of the Taliban and other hard-line Sunni groups.
The result is that the Saudis — through private or covert channels — have tacitly supported the Taliban in ways that make the kingdom an indispensable power broker.
In interviews with The New York Times, a former Taliban finance minister described how he traveled to Saudi Arabia for years raising money while ostensibly on pilgrimage.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Saudi needs us more than we need her - they seem intent on becoming an extension of Iran....
It is my position that Saudi Arabia is an absolute enemy of this country. I will not bore you with reasons I have stated before. I firmly believe from his statements that Trump knows this. He has made obtuse comments that indicated “enemies” and that some enemies are not properly recognized. I don’t see him going pro active on this reality but I’ll bet you he tells them to “cut the bull shit”.
The Saudis are NOT America’s friends. The Saudis have been working for the destruction of America over the long term.
The Saudis funded the madrassas in Pakistan that gave birth to the Taliban and funded the attack on us on 9/11.
We should never have set foot in Afghanistan.
Bounce the rubble until nothing was moving was all the commitment we should have made.
Should have bombed Saudi Arabia immediately after, paying particular attention to Mecca and Medina, the spiritual home of the evil that is at the root of the problem, Islam.
“The Saudis are NOT America’s friends. The Saudis have been working for the destruction of America over the long term.”
Post of the day!
I’m convinced Saudi Arabia with their control of Mecca, and their aggressive, retrograde Wahhabist ideology, their totally opaque, corrupt ruling elite, all combined with the pursuit of monopolistic control of world oil prices - are the greatest force for evil in the world.
When 9/11 occurred, that should have been the wake up call in our 40 year alliance with the devil - they should have been bombed and undergone “regime change.”
That strategy basically works, though it leads to odd situations where the Saudi royal family supports one faction in Afghanistan while the clerics that they fund support another. In other cases, such as jihadis fighting against non-Muslim governments, there is no such apparent conflict.
The Sunni Saudis and Shia Iranians hate one another more than they hate any non-Muslim, so I'm not sure what you mean. The closest thing to this is to say that as to Islamist theocracies of a different flavor, they're so alike that they simply cannot co-exist in peace.
The Saudis and Obama are also footing the bill for and arming ISIS.
They created the Arab Spring and the so-called “refugee” situation.
The Saudis took no refugees.
They are invading the west and making war against us.
Get them all out of our country.
If they don’t cease their war, bomb them.
Throw every US politician who has gone along with this and enabled the Saudi war in PRISON or worse.
What is Trump saying about the Saudies?
He does a lot of business there.
Not sure.
“Some men just want to see the world burn.”
DRill for oil here and then nuke the Saudis
I agree - my thinking was that if the Saudis isolate too much, Iran may opt to "welcome them to the fold" by conquering them. Been some noise/speculation about Iran deciding to go after Saudi - by and large, my comment was more tongue-in-cheek than anything else.
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