One thing that the article didn’t point out is that this is a rejection of a major tenet of the Bush doctrine. In his speech immediately following 9/11, he said, “we’ll make no distinction between the terrorists and the regimes that house them”. At that point, we made the Taliban our enemies along with Al Qaeda. We also made the assertion that if your regime houses terrorists, we consider you an enemy along with the terrorists. If Obama goes back on this, that’s a major rejection of the Bush doctrine.
Leave it up to the ahistorical Marxist to rewrite the story out of thin air and redefine the facts to suit his agenda. Obama delenda est.
My tail feathers will probably get a bit singed but this makes me ponder...the bulk of 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia but we didn’t do anything to SA. They still sponsor those nasty Madrasas (virulient wahabi muslim extremist schools for young minds all over the world). The Saudis are supposedly trying to take the world off the dollar, especially for oil. But our “leader” bows to them.
Pakistan has harbored Al-Q from the get go, including UBL, but we haven’t done much to them (unless Pinkie Bhuto’s assassination was a CAI wet ops - which I doubt).
I think Gen Petraeus’ outreach to Mookie al Sadr and other tribal leaders in Iraq helped us win hearts and minds there.
Afghanistan is run by war lords so it may be a fool’s errand to try to totally erase all vestiges of The Taliban. I’d love to wipe them all out, but Rudyard Kipling’s lines keep running through my head on the idea of ever hoping Afghanistan will become more civil:
The Young British Soldier
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-young-british-soldier/
As Fr. McLaughlin used to say, “Maybe the lad (Bambi) has lurched unexpectedly into the truth.”
P.S. I’m a veteran in case it matters.