Karzai suspends talks with U.S. over Taliban agreement (US EXCLUDES Afghan Gov in talks w Taliban)

"The Afghan president on Wednesday suspended talks with the United States on a new security deal to protest the way his government was being left out of initial peace negotiations with the Taliban meant to find a way to end the nearly 12-year war.

Karzai's statement followed an announcement Tuesday by the U.S. and the Taliban that they would pursue bilateral talks in Qatar before the Afghan government was brought in."

Define victory then. What is their COG that you think we can/near/have destroy(ed)?

Let the Joint Chiefs know as well. A war of attrition; is that considered winning, lol?

When fighting insurgents, victory is outlasting them. We don't have to be there to do the fighting, but as long as our enemies are killed and the guys we're backing don't lose, that's winning. It's a lot like Indian-fighting - our forebears fought the Indians for centuries, almost until the dawn of the 20th century, before armed clashes finally ended.

The Brits like to cite the Malayan Emergency (1945-1979) as an instance of a well-executed campaign where British troops showed our guys (later in Vietnam) how counter-insurgency ought to be done. In reality, British participation in the campaign (using a combo of British draftees and regular troops) as a primary combatant lasted 15 years, and British advisers stayed for another couple of decades, into the late 1970's, along with some amount of British military aid. All told, the counter-insurgency campaign lasted almost 35 years, until the Chinese Communists ended their funding, training and supply program for the Malayan Communist Party.

That's the nature of these things - they take decades of whack-a-mole until the dead-enders give up (usually when their funding dries up). For instance, the Colombians have been knocking off leftist guerrillas for almost 50 years, since 1964, and FARC is still alive and kicking.

While I dont want to see the Taliban get back to their former strength i dont see how we sustain that hell-hole full of barbarians.

The Northern Alliance held off the Taliban for close to a decade with token Indian and Russian support dwarfed by Pakistan's active sponsorship of the Taliban with ISI advisers and equipment. A few billion a year in annual US aid would come close to half the entire Pakistani military budget, which is mostly focused on buying equipment to fight India.

I have little doubt the Afghan government, which is dominated by Northern Alliance leaders, would crush the Taliban over time, as long as we're not too squeamish about the methods they use. They weren't bad at fighting - they were just overwhelmed by an opponent funded lavishly (in relative terms) by the Pakistanis, but as of 9/11/2001, they still held a sizable enclave in Afghanistan.

The Taliban are basically Pashtuns, whereas the government are basically non-Pashtuns who were persecuted during the Taliban's reign. And the Pashtuns are around 40% of the population, with Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks each making up smaller percentages. The McCoy vs Hatfield aspect of things will keep the non-Pashtuns fighting the mainly-Pashtun Taliban even without our help. But with our help, they'll prevent the Taliban from coming to power.

Hell no. We need to make damn sure that doesn't happen. They should be paying us.

That's about as likely as us getting reparations from the Germans and the Japanese for WWII, let alone the return of the massive amounts of grants we sent in their direction in the post-war era. This is after the Germans and the Japanese killed 300K and 100K GI's respectively, during wars in which we spent 2x annual GDP fighting or roughly $32T, if we scale up to today's GDP.

My guess is that we'll pay in one way or another, either through financial aid to keep the Afghan government going, or economic damage after a series of devastating terror attacks stateside once the Taliban takes power and revives its relationship with al Qaeda, in addition to trillions spent on yet another punitive expedition in the region. The difference between Afghanistan and North Vietnam is that the Vietnamese communists never thought of attacking us on our soil. Like I said earlier, I think it's a reasonable political proposition, given that any terrorist attack stateside would be on mainly Democratic territory. The only problem is that as taxpayers, we will all incur tax liabilities from the trillions in war expenditures that follow such a terrorist attack.

If Clinton hasn’t forced Colombia to a “peace settlement” with FARC, which consisted of its handing over huge interior territories to the guerrillas, they’d be gone by now. After Clinton left office, fighting resumed in Colombia - or should I say continued, because the guerrillas had been attacking from their Clinton guaranteed safe havens all along. Finally the government was successful, since the guerrillas had no popular support and once the people felt safe, they resisted them and it was clear they were not going to make any headway.

The leaders were aged, most of the important ones had been killed, and all that was left were those colonies in the jungle, mostly made up of people kidnapped by FARC as children to be “guerrilla soldiers.” The latter are being resettled and reintegrated into normal life.

So without Clinton’s breath of air, the guerrillas would probably have been overcome at least 20 years earlier.

Incidentally, Obama has obviously been encouraging FARC, or what’s left of it, because suddenly a couple of new Marxist FARC leaders have emerged, demanding that they be allowed to participate in the political process...and that they be given large tracts of land again.

Normally, the leaders of reconciled groups - such as the paramilitaries that fought the guerrillas - are not allowed to be politically active, since Latin America has seen way too many people like Chavez, who had been imprisoned rather then killed after an earlier attempt at a Marxist takeover, released in a moment of foolish trust on the part of the government, and then came back to be a rabble rouser and eventually take over and destroy the legitimate government and economy of VZ.

And don’t forget the time when they had Chavez under arrest at the airport for his autogolpe, and he was released at the last moment, without any doubt by US intervention. Bush was president at that time, but State was full of its usual career leftists and Bush always did whatever they told him to do. Chavez went on to be the destabilizing, destructive dictator that he was, abundantly encouraged by Obama, and left behind a ruined country.

The US is playing its usual dishonorable part in giving air to these people, be they Marxist or Islamist, and turning over the populations that trusted us to a guerrilla that we have empowered.

Apparently there was enough backlash, so that:

Afghanistan peace talks: US-Taliban meeting in Qatar cancelled

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/20/afghanistan-talks-taliban-qatar-cancelled

“Repeated phone calls by John Kerry, the US secretary of state, appeared not to have mollified Karzai, who accused the Obama administration of duplicity. Irritated by a press conference in Qatar at which the Taliban attempted to portray themselves as a government in exile, Karzai suspended talks on a long-term security deal to keep US troops in Afghanistan after Nato leaves in 2014.

News on Tuesday that American diplomats would sit down with Taliban leaders – the first direct talks since the US helped oust the group from power in 2001 – prompted speculation that real progress towards a negotiated end to the war in Afghanistan might be in sight.

But while the Taliban hinted at meeting US demands of a break with al-Qaida – saying Afghan soil should not be used to harm other countries – there was only the barest of nods to Kabul’s request that they talk to the current administration and respect Afghanistan’s constitution. The group infuriated Karzai by displaying a white Taliban flag and repeatedly referring to the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan”, the name the group used when they ruled from Kabul.”

The whole idea for the US government to undermine the legitimate government of Afghanistan to negotiate with the terrorists (remember, the Taliban allowed Al Qaeda to plan and practice that 9-11 attacks) bypassing the legitimate gov of Afghanistan is a clear signal that the US (i.e. Obama government) supports the terrorists.

Apparently they finally figured it out that they shouldn’t support the terrorists quite so openly...

“When fighting insurgents, victory is outlasting them.”

BS especially if the causes for the insurgency/"terrorism" are perpetual. A country should never get in a foreign war of attrition, the debt and moral is not worth the hassle.

"It's a lot like Indian-fighting - our forebears fought the Indians for centuries, almost until the dawn of the 20th century, before armed clashes finally ended."

Was not exactly fought on foreign soil and the US basically annihilated some Indian tribes near/out of existence. In essence, the COG was taken care of to the point of extinction while expansion occurred. Also, the colonialists of British North America had several alliances where several tribes ASSIMILATED into Western culture and peaceably coexisted (Middle-colonies). In the end, the Indian straw-man is a case of apples and oranges with the Islamic threat.

Again, specific Cold War tactics/strategy led to the destruction of the COG, not attrition. Another case of apples to oranges when dealing with the Islamic threat and the failure to even go after the COG.

What is the COG of the South/Central/Mexico problem? Do you see that being effectively targeted/destroyed? lol. What is the COG of the Islamic "insurgents"? Do you see that being destroyed or even targeted, lol?

We went there because the Taleban government of Afghanistan allowed their country to be used as home base for the people who executed 9/11. I am surprised, that village idiot John Kerry wants to talk peace with the Talibs. Especially more surprised, that we are still talking peace when hours after our nonsensical announcement that we are trying to bring back to power the very people who did 9/11, they attacked Bagram air base and killed 4 US Servicemen, and CLAIMED FULL RESPONSIBILITY. Heck, just leaving and allowing Karzai to deal with this would be better than installing our own enemies back to power after spending ten years getting rid of them.

Amen to every bit of that.

This, then is what we have to contend with.

In addition to all of that, now these damnable fools are talking about either leaving behind or destroying 12,000 of those very expensive heavy trucks and vehicles we developed to protect our people against IEDs because they say it is too expensive to ship them back.

What? Is it more expensive to ship them back home than buy completely new ones when we next need them? For crying out loud, we developed them sepcifically to fight this type of enemy and now we are going to leave them behind or destroy them ourselvess?

I know personally that we could ship them back if wanted to. It would just take time and Obama and his admin are so anxious to get the hell out of dodge (even to the point of negotiating with the Taliban as they kill our troops and personally take credit for it) that they will dwarf the waste we have seen in other conflicts on a per capita/soldier basis

These folks are absolutley hair brained...and seem bent on supporting the very enemies we fight who themselves are hell bent on killing us.

Obama and his abettors, appointees, and other knuckle draggers are a worse enemy than the people we fight. Those enemeis could not have destroyed these vehicles, and would have counted it a great victory to even destroy ten of them at one time. And yet, now our “leaders” will have us destroy them by the thousands, to the tune of billions of dollars ourselves!

In fact Afghanistan wasn’t such a crappy place back when and it was developing pretty rapidly. It had an airline, ‘Ariana’ if memory serves me well. Afghanistan actually slided into barbarism in late 1980s, about time the USSR lost interest in propping a secular regime and withdrew troops.
True enough.

So called Soviet-Afghan War was pretty similar to current events in Syria. Russians weren’t perfect but they certainly were a less evil side.
I never thought that the Russians were more or less evil than the Syrians. The Russian history of brutality to its own people is unparalleled. I had a chance to visit Russia in 2008; I heard their stories and saw that things were okay there but that the Russians had a l-o-n-g way to go to catch up with even the Chinese. I believed (and it's only a belief) that the Russians still had a l-o-n-g way to go.
Where I live are a ton of Chinese and Russian refugees. Both groups seem to be adjusting very well to the American way. It seems, naturally probably, that the younger the immigrants the better they adjust. The oldsters have a tough time. Not easy for them. They weren't used to having to work like dogs for the good stuff.

I lived in the middle east for five years and didn't see the horror that I thought to expect after reading and hearing all the anti-Muslim/Arab stuff here in the USA. The big/huge difference is that the Arabs have the good ole capitalism idea, rather, that life is a dog-eat-dog world and people don't get things handed to them. The Russians seemed to still think that the "state" should take care of them. I guess it's tough to get off the 80-year-old nipple. Communism worked for the lazy, stupid, incompetent, unassertive and non-competitive. Everyone got stuff without having to life a finger. Not good for people.
My husband and I worked for ARAMCO. I worked with 30 Saudis. They treated all men the same; they treated their women like children--and many of them acted like children. They treated foreign women from 3rd countries okay and European women very well.
We American women were treated like princesses and queens. We could do no wrong. Hahaha, I had some interesting confrontations with the Saudis. I always won because I was the American woman--TOTALLY unafraid and secure in who I was. Bullies, though few in number, are both male and female and exist everywhere. My DAD taught me to deal with them at a very early age.
Sidenote: My dad was in north Africa during most of WWII and went to Anzio. He would never talk about it but he did NOT like the Arabs. They cheated him once. He didn't get over it.

If the Afghani leadership hadn't been so corrupt, there would have been no need/opportunity for foreign takeover.

Our group of ARAMCO women visited Damascus way back when his father was in charge. We loved it. We were all shoppers and had a fabulous time. ARAMCO always had to bring a SECOND ARAMCO plane just to haul all the stuff we ARAMCO women bought! I didn't buy much because I never was a shopper--very unwomanly of me. But...I did buy jewelry. GREAT deals! Gold was cheap, cheap, cheap and you could NOT buy gold that was less that 22 karat.
Sigh, I don't wear it any more and gave away most of it to female family members!

Outside of its most northern border, Afghanistan is almost a no-man’s land. It is very landlocked by mountains and deserts, little or no major rivers, and a very poor road system. All of this creates an economic environment which makes traditional commerce almost impossible outside of the largest cities, leading to most of the country being very poor, isolated, tribal regions. Subsistence farming using terraced farms to capture runoff is the norm in most of the country. It is almost impossible for anyone to travel from a small village into a large town. You would need a rugged vehicle, provisions, jerrycans of gasoline, and weapons.

You sound like you've seen it first-hand.
I always saw it as poor, poor, poor. The Pakistanis told us that.
The Afghanis are STILL 99% tribal and you are who your tribe is.

The way the world is that USUALLY the strongest have the best places. The Roman legions got Italy; the Germanic tribes got Germany; the Franks battled for France and the English fought EVERYONE to keep their island.

No one wanted the Arabian peninsula as it was dessert, waterless and filled with NASTY spiders. A camel spider bit me once--it jumped out of my hall closet and bit my hand--hurt like hell! I had to go to the clinic and get BLASTED with benadryl and such! The doctor was an Irishman named Murphy! :o) Go figure.

WHOODA ever THUNK that the poor, dusty bedouins who lived in that nasty, graveled, sandless, HOT, mosquito-infested, camel-spider infested PESTHOLE would be sitting on what we westerners HAD TO HAVE: petroleum. It's one of God's really classic jokes!

Back in the mid-1980's the King owned all the petroleum, as the ARAMCO companies sold all the petroleum back to the Saudis. They paid an arm and a leg to get it back. HOWEVER, the King, who owns ALL the petroleum (If HE owns it all there is NO argument between the families of the country) makes/nets one-one and a half BILLION dollars EVERY OTHER DAY--1983 dollars. Who can IMAGINE what he rakes in now.

The royal family gives billions away in charity every year, even to Christian countries. That bit of information never gets in the news HERE, naturally. I saw that myself and helped with that with our little women's groups in the company.

Just curious, don't mean to pry, were you in the military over in Afghanistan?

1. John Kerry is a MORON, totally useless--a deadly combination.

2. I say let the Afghanis have their country back, 100%, ONLY after every single American and European soldier is home safe! We are FOOLS to try to change ANYTHING in the proverbial THIRD WORLD SEWERS. Those people have the tools to change their own destiny. WE can't give them the will.

3. We keep trying, though. We tried in Vietnam. I wish we had learned out lesson. Communism does itself in; always will. People can't be forced in "democracy." Democracy or, rather, a REPRESENTATIVE REPUBLIC, like we have, requires a FIRST WORLD mentality, economy and philosophy--read that last part as Christian. IMHO.

I HATE to see us try to change the proverbial sow's ear into a silk purse. CANNOT happen.

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