Dialogue With Taliban the Only Way Out of Afghanistan [so much for Am Cons]

The American Conservative ^ | March 5, 2018 | Adam Weinstein

[SunkenCiv]

It's past time the United States did some soul-searching and accept responsibility for exacerbating an unwinnable war in Afghanistan. This will require a rethink of Washington's current handling of Afghanistan and indeed its entire view of the region. Steve Coll recently made a cogent argument in the New York Times that the U.S. should seriously engage with China and other regional powers. However, this is impossible so long as Washington remains convinced that Pakistan alone is the primary impediment to peace rather than its own mistakes... Both Islamabad and Washington compete to wear the cloak of victimhood. Pakistan remains in denial about its support of the Haqqani Network and other militant groups, while the U.S. has failed to acknowledge Pakistan's staggering losses, with the recent suicide bombing in Swat sending more innocent lives to the morgue. Washington further irks Islamabad by refusing to officially validate its concerns about India's activities in Afghanistan. Yet former secretary of defense Chuck Hagel admitted, "India for some time has always used Afghanistan as a second front."

[Bookshelf]

Adam Weinstein is a senior editor for Task & Purpose. A Navy veteran and career journalist, he worked previously at the Village Voice, The Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, and Gawker,
Always check the source.

[Zhang Fei]

If you call Gulf War 2 winning, then why is the US military still fighting there FIFTEEN years after ‘winning‘ ?
know the truth and it will set you free

---

Guerrilla wars take a while to peter out, even when the guerrillas have no real hope of victory. 15 years is a relative blink of the eye in guerrilla war. American settlers started fighting Indians in the 16th century. The last Indian attacks ended around the 1910’s, over 300 years later. Hope dies hard in the human breast. And yet no one thought the Indians had any prospect of victory even during Washington’s time, meaning the continuation of Indian resistance was nuisance rather than existential threat.

[Flag_This]

What ever happened to the Northern Alliance? They weren’t big fans of the taliban, as I recall...

[Gay State Conservative]

The US military has a perfect track record since 1945. Never won a war

That's because weak kneed politicians...and Communist sympathizers...wouldn't allow it.

Korea? One or two small,well placed,nukes just south of the N Korea/China border...and then a promise of "and there are more where they came from" from Truman...would have won it.

Vietnam? Kerry,Fonda,BillyBob Blythe,ILLary,Bill Ayers,etc.

[FreedomPoster]

I see you are a realist about Afghanistan.

We should have left after the punitive expedition phase and never started the meals on wheels phase. We should have been out by, say, 2004.

[thoughtomator]

The least conservative idea in existence today is the idea that invading other countries can help either them or us.

[cranked]

Utter utter idiocy.

Talking with nationstates is one thing but you cannot talk/negotiate with terrorists nor Islamic extremist groups.

Their end goals will always remain the same.....

[Wuli]

I have been on the fence for some time about our continued long slog in Afghanistan, yet I can’t think of anything about the U.S. efforts, militarily or diplomatically (other than not acting WWII - total war style in order to win) that puts the blame for conditions there on the U.S.

Paksitan’s losses are from the Pakistan political class attempting to militarily get control of those parts of Pakistan it has seldom had control. Yes kith and kin of the Taliban are also in that fight. However, the Pakistan state is a duplicitous one and has never operated forcefully and directly against the Taliban interests in Pakistan that are directly assisting, and part of, the Taliban in Afghanistan. That was the same duplicity of theirs that let them claim they were with us in fighting the terrorists, while they helped Osama Bin Laden hide out near to their main military school.

Internally, in spite of being a nuclear state, Pakistan is a dysfunctional and politically fractured state, with different forces, different agendas operating at cross purposes to each other. The main thing that is sustained is that the military-industrial (tons of Pakistan industry owned and run by the military) and intelligence complexes continue to call most of the shots. And they do so with Islamist-centric nationalism with an inferiority complex toward India.

[Zhang Fei]

The least conservative idea in existence today is the idea that invading other countries can help either them or us.

---

Of course it helps them. The Shiites and Kurds in Iraq don’t have to live under Sunni Arab (20%) minority oppression any more. Imagine if this country were 80% white, 20% black and ruled by a black ruling caste headed by Louis Farrakhan that systematically killed and oppressed whites. Wouldn’t it be a good thing if some foreign invader toppled Farrakhan and ended the supremacy of that black ruling caste? That’s in essence what we did in Iraq.

[thoughtomator]

I will spare myself the time of deconstructing that simplistic fallacy and simply note that you are de facto conceding the point that these wars don’t help us - Americans - at all.

[Zhang Fei]

I will spare myself the time of deconstructing that simplistic fallacy and simply note that you are de facto conceding the point that these wars don’t help us - Americans - at all.

---

They helped us by killing off Muslims with the guts to do jihad rather than merely preach it. And the ensuing intra-Muslim slaughter is giving Muslims second thoughts about Islam, which isn’t such a bad thing.

As to being simplistic, reality is fairly simple. Kurds and Shiites, who could have returned to the good old days under Saddam by electing Sunni Arabs to power, chose otherwise. They certainly did very little against US troops the whole time our guys were there.

[vooch]

So your argument is essentially the US military can‘t win it’s wars fighting like soldiers so therefore the military should be encouraged to mass murder tens of millions indiscriminately.

really ?

[TalonDJ]

“So your argument is essentially the US military can‘t win it’s wars fighting like soldiers so therefore the military should be encouraged to mass murder tens of millions indiscriminately.”

Oh yeah, because ‘soldiers’ hamper themselves with restrictions and more restrictions until the war is a stale mate. To be all fair and stuff.

Screw that. SOLDIERS (airmen) blew the hell out of Japanese and WON.

[TalonDJ]

“They helped us by killing off Muslims with the guts to do jihad rather than merely preach it. And the ensuing intra-Muslim slaughter is giving Muslims second thoughts about Islam, which isn’t such a bad thing.”

Well if the goal is to hang our troops out there as terrorist fly paper from now until forever... then yeah I guess it is going great. That is only sort of sarcasm. I mean really... if that IS the goal then the war is going just fine.

[Zhang Fei]

Well if the goal is to hang our troops out there as terrorist fly paper from now until forever... then yeah I guess it is going great. That is only sort of sarcasm. I mean really... if that IS the goal then the war is going just fine.

---

They’re not children. They volunteered to fight the nation’s wars, just as cops volunteer to fight a given jurisdiction’s crime. Heck, most infantry types sign up just to do this stuff, and get bored in peacetime conditions. As long as we don’t get in their way with nutty Obama-era rules of engagement, I think it’s entirely reasonable that they hunt down and kill the kinds of jihadists and jihadist supporters who carried out 9/11 and numerous other terror attacks against American civilians.

[zeestephen]

Re: “If you call Gulf War 2 winning, then why is the US military still fighting there FIFTEEN years after ‘winning‘ ?

Same geography, but new enemies, every five years.

By the way - I haven’t supported any USA intervention since Vietnam, which began at the highpoint of the Cold War, and which clearly demonstrated USA resolve during a period when every continent on Earth was threatened by radical Communist regimes.

[MplsSteve]

“You’ll have to kill everyone. Then return every 5 years to do it again.”

IIRC, the Russians were a lot harder on the Afghanis than we were. They had no reservations about carpet-bombing a village that they thought they were fired upon from.

But in the great scheme of things, it didn’t work. The Afghanis just hardened their resolve. It was like “What the hell do we care if we die?”