The people of Afghanistan have had over 20 years of American's offering to help take out the Taliban. Hey we've got the most powerful miltary ever with weapons that will blow your mind - you guys want to put a group together and kill the Taliban.
They say yes take the weapons and then don't kill themselves, weird.
Afghanistan is a shithole country - guess what happens when you jump in a shithole, well now we don't have to guess we know.
I don't see what we gain by remaining in Afghanistan another day but I am fairly ignorant on most things and what I don't know fills libraries
Once again Wuli thank you for a cogent argument in the face of a stiff head wind
“Time is not on our side it on the Taliban’s side. Wheres the Taliban going to go they are Afghans and a lot of Afghans like the Taliban. They are the Taliban.”
No, that is not knowledge based. The core, and the vast majority of the Taliban are Pashtun (an ethnic/tribal designation). The Pashtun are also the main ethnic group in the rather lawless northwest of Pakistan. But not all Afghan’s are Pashtun, no matter how much the Islamist-biased Google search engine keeps bringing up links that try to say that Pashtun and Afghan are interchangeable - they are not.
The nationality of “Afghan” includes a number of tribal/ethnic groups, no matter how much Islamists try to claim that all Afghans are Pashtun (that is the same claim of the Taliban).
The Afghan regional & ethnic groups that fought with us when we entered Afghanistan were neither Pashtun nor Taliban.
Because there are also so many Pashtun in Pakistan, it was not difficult for the Pakistani ISI to create the Taliban among the Pashtun and aim its agenda against all the other forces in Afghanistan. The Pakistani ISI wanted to use the Taliban as their means, their way, of getting remote-control of Afghanistan after the departure of the Soviets. Only the Taliban eventually ran with their own agenda, and the Pakistan military establishment has had to fight the Taliban’s religious kin in predominately Pashtun northwest Pakistan.
The Taliban are essentially fighting for religious and Pashtun control of all of Afghanistan, against all other Afghans.
“The people of Afghanistan have had over 20 years of American’s offering to help take out the Taliban.”
And the democratically elected government of Afghanistan and the Afghan people behind it are not asking anything different today, so why give the Taliban what they and they alone want - they do not speak for all Afghans.
Almost never mentioned in the media about the talks our state department was having with the Taliban is that those talks excluded the government of Afghanistan, altogether. That manner of negotiation was a total cave in to the Taliban, who insisted that the elected government of Afghanistan could not be in the talks because they are illegitimate. It was doomed to fail because it reinforced the Talibans total lack of respect for all of the Afghan people regardless of ethnic identity.
Now, the positive result of the failed talks is the Afghan government is in the driver seat and if the Taliban want a “deal” it is with the Afghan government they will have to compromise.
I think Trump is making the same mistake with North Korea, which also is talks that do not involve who most of all needs to be in those talks - South Korea. Kim has, in his public’s mind, by his one-on-talks with Trump, reinforced the idea that the government of South Korea is illegitimate and unimportant to the peace he will make with Trump.