Posted on 03/04/2020 6:18:00 AM PST by artichokegrower
I never imagined I would ever write these three words. It pains me, in fact, to see them on the page. But credit where credit is due. Over the weekend, at the Sheraton hotel in Doha, Qatar, the Trump administration was able to achieve in its first term what the Bush and Obama administrations were either unable or unwilling to do over two terms each: Sign a peace deal with the Taliban.
(Excerpt) Read more at theintercept.com ...
A large meteor could land on Afghanistan removing it from the planet and the rest of Earth's inhabitants would not miss it.
I am also aware that Trump has never been consistent on Afghanistan, nor does he give a damn about ordinary Afghans.
The ONLY reason for being in another country is to protect America and Americans.
Obama, for example, was scorned and slammed for releasing five Taliban detainees in exchange for a captured U.S. soldier, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, in 2014;
An Islamist praises impending Taliban victory. No surprises here.
The kuffar, the disbelievers, the atheists who remain deaf and stubborn to the teachings of Islam, the rational message of the Koran; they are described in the Koran as “a people of no intelligence”, Allah describes them as not of no morality, not as people of no belief – people of “no intelligence” – because they’re incapable of the intellectual effort it requires to shake off those blind prejudices, to shake off those easy assumptions about this world, about the existence of God. In this respect, the Koran describes the atheists as “cattle”, as cattle of those who grow the crops and do not stop and wonder about this world.[47]
In response to criticism over the use of the term “cattle” to describe non-believers, Hasan wrote in his New Statesman blog: “The Quranic phrase ‘people of no intelligence’ simply and narrowly refers to the fact that Muslims regard their views on God as the only intellectually tenable position, just as atheists (like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris) regard believers as fundamentally irrational and, even, mentally deficient.”]
Yeah that was handled well by bush.
the taliban crushed opium production. Who the hell cares what they did to the people there?
As long as we leveled any training camps from the sky I’d be good.
GW. All of the Bushes aren’t worth Trump’s spit.
Hey, me neither.
#ImagineThat
This is Syria all over. The Deep State is going to veto Trump’s pull out of Afghanistan.
I’m old enough to remember when the goal of OEF was to destroy Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. After we did that in about six months, we turned our sights on the Taliban and have been grinding away to make Afghanistan into the US ever since.
How many of the 9/11 hijackers were from Afghanistan? The Taliban sheltered OBL. He has been dead for years and not even in that country for longer than that. At some point, still being in Afghanistan became even dumber than originally going into Iraq.
I heard “we have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here” for years. I’ve even repeated it. Well, that’s a fake argument. Since 9/11 we have let ever-increasing numbers of them into here. We are still training them to fly planes. It’s amazing how the one policy that is absolutely 100% politically impossible is the one that most Americans wanted after 9/11: They don’t get to come here. That was never even on the table. Many Black Americans (who are experiencing record low levels of unemployment due to the economic leadership of the Trump Administration in case you hadn’t heard) expressed dismay to me that the 9/11 terrorists were allowed into our country. Well, what the people wanted was never tried.
Donald Trump ran partly on ending neocon wars and not starting any new neocon wars. He is holding the line on that against enormous pressure from within “his own” party. That’s why Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz, Jennifer Rubin, et al. hate Trump so much. It’s also why some former Never-Trumpers have come to support Trump or even serve in his administration: to manipulate from within. We were supposed to have been at war in at least Syria and Iran by now, in addition to Iraq and Afghanistan. You know, because fighting wars in the Middle East serves America’s interests ... somehow.
President Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, mainly for what he has refused to do to this point, but the prize doesn’t deserve him.
What they also hate is the threat of money being cut off to both insiders as well as outside contractors who make quite a bit of money from being there.
“A quadrupling in opium production”
Soon to be worthless due to the popularity of much more potent and cheaper fentanyl.
And do a buh-zillion dollars of improvement. Besides, didn’t the head cheese from a-stan back out already?
With regard to giving a damn about ordinary Afghans, President Trump has multiple times included the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in the countries in whose wars we have gotten into, in addition to the cost in U.S. lives and the monetary cost.
The prior administration took great pains to minimize collateral damage. While Trump has re-balanced the rules of engagement. This re-balancing of the rules of engagement reflects a different approach to motivating the other side to come to terms, not a downgrading of concern for the lives of others.
Under the prior administration, no war was ended (one was merely suspended for a time) and the wars continued. The short-term fixation on minimizing collateral damage came at a high long-run cost in terms of continuing war. The current administration’s policy has mostly extricated us from Syria and Iraq, and resulted in a peace treaty to which both the Taliban and the government in Kabul have balked. In all three cases, they continue fighting each other with or without us. We did not, and we were never going to bring peace, freedom or prosperity to that region. It is a Godforesaken place that will be at war for the foreseeable future.
There’s a lesson in this, and that is that Barack Obama, Ron Paul and Donald Trump were right, perhaps for different reasons, and the neo-cons in both parties were wrong. Obviously, we had to blow up the Taliban for allowing Al Qaida to use Afghanistan as a staging area to attack us; but, defeating them didn’t mean we had an obligation to “reconstruct” that country. We accomplished the job of defeating the Taliban and their Pakistani allies in short order. It was then foolish for the Bush administration to plan a surge in Afghanistan and for the Obama administration to follow through on that surge.
Anyone in Afghanistan under the age of 20 has never known any other life than war with the US. What have we gained from it? Better let them suffer under the Taliban than hate us from afar.
Satan has you fooled, Mr. Hasan.
There is no Allah but Satan, and Muhammad was his murdering pedophile.
I’m not a fan of negotiating with the Taliban. The only negotiation should involve machete to neck.
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