Posted on 08/31/2021 12:00:43 AM PDT by weston
No PLAN, Blinken? YOU ARE A STONE COLD LIAR!!!!
U.S. Signs Peace Deal With Taliban After Nearly 2 Decades Of War In Afghanistan
February 29, 20208:20 AM ET
Heard on Weekend Edition Saturday
FTA: The U.S. and the Taliban have struck a deal that paves the way for eventual peace in Afghanistan. U.S. Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad and the head of the militant Islamist group, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, signed the potentially historic agreement Saturday in Doha, Qatar, where the two sides spent months hashing out its details.
Under the terms of the deal, the U.S. commits to withdrawing all of its military forces and supporting civilian personnel, as well as those of its allies, within 14 months. The drawdown process will begin with the U.S. reducing its troop levels to 8,600 in the first 135 days and pulling its forces from five bases.
The rest of its forces, according to the agreement, will leave “within the remaining nine and a half months.”
The Afghan government also will release up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners as a gesture of goodwill, in exchange for 1,000 Afghan security forces held by the Taliban.
“We owe a debt of gratitude to America’s sons and daughters who paid the ultimate sacrifice in Afghanistan, and to the many thousands who served over the past nearly 19 years,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a statement celebrating the deal, which comes on the heels of a seven-day “Reduction in Violence” agreement in Afghanistan.
“The only responsible way to end the war in Afghanistan is through a negotiated political settlement. Today is a reflection of the hard work of our Nation’s military, the U.S. Department of State, intelligence professionals, and our valued partners,” he added. “The United States is committed to the Afghan people, and to ensuring that Afghanistan never becomes a safe haven for terrorists to threaten our homeland and our Allies.”
The U.S. intends, along with members of the United Nations Security Council, to “remove members of the Taliban from the sanctions list with the aim of achieving this objective by May 29, 2020” — and Washington, in particular, aims to remove the group from U.S. sanctions by Aug 27, 2020.
The U.S. has pledged to seek the Security Council’s recognition and endorsement of the plan.
The Afghan government will also begin negotiations with the Taliban to map out a political settlement which would establish the role the Taliban would play in a future Afghanistan. These negotiations are expected to start next month. One of the first tasks in these intra-Afghan talks will be to achieve a lasting ceasefire in Afghanistan.
Separately, in Kabul, Afghanistan, U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg signed a joint declaration with the Afghan government — represented by President Ashraf Ghani — that commits the Afghans to these up-coming negotiations with the Taliban and to provide Afghanistan with security guarantees as this process unfolds.
The deal signed Saturday has been 18 months in the making.
There were nine rounds of on-again, off-again talks in Doha — the Qatari capital where the Taliban maintains an office — which began in 2018. The U.S. and Taliban had reached an agreement last summer, but President Trump walked away from those talks after a U.S. service member was killed in a September car bombing in the Afghan capital, Kabul.
Only the U.S., led by its chief representative, Khalilzad, and the Taliban have taken part in the negotiations, an arrangement that New York University’s Barnett Rubin says was designed by the Taliban and resisted until recently by the U.S.
“Since 2010 [the Taliban] always insisted there would be two stages: international and then intra-Afghan,” says Rubin, who served from 2009-2013 as special advisor to the State Department’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan and now directs the Afghanistan Pakistan Regional Program at NYU’s Center on International Cooperation.
The Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan, which lasted just five years, ended abruptly with the invasion of a U.S.-led military coalition shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Their overthrow was a reprisal for having harbored Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaida, whose militants hijacked and crashed four American airliners in those attacks.
President Trump has repeatedly vowed to end America’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan, the most prolonged of all U.S. conflicts. Within months of assuming the presidency, though, Trump added 4,000 U.S. troops to the 8,900 American forces already deployed there.
More than 2,400 Americans have died in Afghanistan during nearly 18 years of fighting, at an estimated cost to the U.S. Treasury of nearly $1 trillion. In recent years, despite the surge in troop levels, the Taliban have fought U.S. and Afghan forces to what Milley has called “a state of strategic stalemate.”
This past month has seen less bloodshed than usual in the country, as Taliban fighters promised to suspend major attacks and U.S. forces agreed to suspend offensive operations — except attacks against Islamic State insurgents — during the recent weeklong “reduction in violence” period.
“We have seen just these last six days a significant reduction in violence in Afghanistan,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on Friday, shortly before flying to the Doha signing ceremony. Earlier in the week, Pompeo called the partial truce “imperfect,” but said “it’s working.”
Here are some of the key elements in that political resolution:
READ MORE HERE.......
Sorry guys, I got home around 3, checked in here, giggles at the Adrian Monk comment, and then got lost in organizing everything I bought. Got a ton of canned goods, toilet paper and paper towels and a variety of other stuff. Since some of it came from Sam’s Club it was huge packages! So I needed to make room for them.
Adrian Monk, LOL! Don’t you love him?! Remember when he was cleaning his light bulbs?
I can eat casseroles but I do like to pick them apart. I don’t pick them apart first and have all these neat little piles of noodle, peas, tuna or chicken, Etc. Just as I’m eating.
I’m thinking about prepping for 1. That would be so much easier. I’m still prepping for 3, at least. I always figured we will have visitors. But if I aim for prepping for 1 it probably would be just right for two or three.
A friend of mine that has three kids, so five in the family, has five big Costco packages of toilet paper. One for each person. Does that seem excessive? Seems like a lot to me, but she does have a large family.
I have kept everything too, I can’t talk. I even have a filing cabinet with everything filed by year 😊
My boys are nostalgic- no doubt it will all go in the trash 😂
“There comes a point when you know you have said the last word that you are going to say on this subject.”
Already done that, hubby is being quite obnoxious about what am I going to do if I get covid, why don’t I get the vaccine, I had already told him a couple days before to look up Robert Malone M.D.. and look at what happened to me Israel, although don’t use Google cuz you will never find any information. He can get very obsessive, and repetitive as if we never discussed something. I don’t know if it’s the Asperger’s or dementia starting. Apparently the two go hand in glove.
I think this guy has a great idea. Instead of one day though we should take an entire week. Don’t go to work, don’t shop, don’t send the kids to school, and have the employer’s and Shop owners and education system see what it will be like.
You have mail!
Bawhahahahaha!!!
Thanks for the belly laugh!
wurst den dat.
It b
I guess it would depend for the length of time you want to prep for?
I use the Angel Soft double rolls, 12 rolls in a pack. I think a package lasts me 6 months, best I remember.
I wonder who gave the command… Time to put your masks on. You can bet if this were the Trump administration the name of that person would be leaked
.........
The best answer as to how the Chinese pulled this off world wide is this part of a long article.
How did we get here? This is how. The Masked Ball of COWARDICE,,snippet.
Lockdowns,” the mass quarantine of both sick and healthy people, have never before been used for disease mitigation in the modern Western world. Previously, the strategy had been systematically ruled out by the pandemic plans of the World Health Organization (WHO) and by health experts of every developed nation.
For Xi Jinping, lockdown was never about a virus. It was about sending a message: that stripped of all disguise, the illusion of virtue, competence, and commitment to human rights among the Western political class is nothing more than conformity with easily subvertible norms and institutions passed down by prior generations. As lockdown policies grind on into their 18th month, it’s increasingly difficult to disagree with him.
Mass lockdowns of entire countries as a technique for fighting disease sprung into the world’s consciousness on the order of Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who fomented a global propaganda offensive targeting Western governments and media. Within weeks, the WHO, an organization that once devoted itself to fighting disease and which has sadly become a tool of Chinese foreign policy, promulgated lockdowns into global policy through a series of press conferences that showed a complete absence of analysis or logic.
The world has been fighting a virus from China with a public health policy from China that transforms the world into China. But if the national security community has noticed this bizarre development, they haven’t said so. Instead, their preoccupation has remained largely unchanged since February 2020. Insiders have confirmed that by spring 2020 the national security community was convinced that SARS-CoV-2 was a supervirus leaked from the Wuhan lab, explaining why many supported lockdowns. Yet the key pieces of information that gave rise to the lab leak theory were the videos of Wuhan residents suddenly falling dead, the contrived tale of heroic whistleblower Li Wenliang, and Xi Jinping’s apparent success locking down Wuhan, the city with the lab in it.
One national security official after another has claimed to know the virus came from the Wuhan lab, even as the underlying intelligence information has changed little. If these officials are as confident as they claim to be, great !It does not change the fact that Covid’s average infection fatality rate (IFR) across all age groups is under 0.24%. It’s long past time to address the more concerning question to which the rest of the public has long since moved on: why governments across the world have copied and continue to copy China’s anti-democratic, totalitarian measures in response to COVID-19.
One by one, governments of the world imported China’s totalitarian lockdown measures. Neil Ferguson, whose series of alarmist, wildly inaccurate models fueled lockdowns around the world, recalled how China’s example had inspired him:
I think people’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically between January and March … It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought … And then Italy did it. And we realised we could … If China had not done it, the year would have been very different......
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/masked-ball-cowardice
He makes some very good points and I agree there is no use arguing. Not sure how this VAX vs NO-VAX is going to end but us freedom loving people will not be threatened into getting it if we don’t want to.
We may have to resort to something like he suggests, a mass walk off, to make our point.
I made my famous “Feed the 5,000 Salad” yesterday, cut ingredients in 1/2 and still had 2 YUGE bowls.
Bought a ham at Slaveway and had it sliced.
Hubby called Bubba and told him to come get dinner, told him to give his doggy, Curly, a slice of ham and tell him it was from me, after a nice visit sent him on his way with a small bowl of salad and several slices of ham, he LOVES ham.
BTW Curly called to thank me but complained he only got 1/2 of a slice of ham.
Could it be because governor DeSantis of Florida started up regional centers for monoclonal antibodies where people could go upon early detection of Covid? It seems that the Democrats are terrified of the great leader that DeSantis is and do not want him to have success. It appears that the Dems do not care about people living or dying.
Rudy Giuliani said it was the Mask Nazi.
He did not comply.
Said they all had to be in place 45 minutes before Biden got there, everyone was hugging, laughing and talking without a mask the whole time.
Then comes the Mask Nazi and she says Biden DEMANDS everyone wear a mask.
Rudy says he doesn’t have the authority to do that.
He was sitting next to a doctor that proceeded to tell MN that a mask is not need outdoors, she finally got tired of arguing with them and moved on.
Rudy remained maskless.
seems like you have a lot for the two of you.
I don’t know what impresses me more: the fact that Curly can talk or that he was able to dial your number on the phone! 😄
We have ALL been SCREAMING it is all about CONTROL for well over a year.
Guess we are just waiting for the rest of the world to wake up and catch up.
I have a few problems like monk. Colors are a big problem for me, they have to mstch.
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