Trump Dumps Chumps
U.S. peace talks with the Taliban are now “dead,” President Donald Trump declared Monday, one day after he abruptly canceled a secret meeting he had arranged with Taliban and Afghan leaders aimed at ending America’s longest war.
Trump’s remark to reporters at the White House suggested he sees no point in resuming a nearly yearlong effort to reach a political settlement with the Taliban, whose protection of al-Qaida extremists in Afghanistan prompted the U.S. to invade after the 9/11 attacks.
“They’re dead as far as I’m concerned,” Trump said when asked about the proposed talks with Taliban leaders.
Trump spoke to reporters as he left the White House, after he canceled a meeting scheduled with the Taliban at Camp David for Sunday.
The president called the Taliban attacks “a big mistake.”
He said that the United States had escalated attacks against the Taliban in response to the terrorist attack that killed 12 people as well as one U.S. soldier and one Romanian solder in Kabul.
“We’ve hit the Taliban harder in the last four days than they’ve been hit in over ten years,” he said.
Trump said that meeting with Taliban leaders was his idea and that it was his idea to terminate the meeting after learning about them claiming responsibility for the attacks.
Anyone think peace talks with the Taliban would bear fruit? Yeah, me neither. Read the rest of the article here: Breitbart
Category: Afghanistan, GWOT, Taliban
We have the watches, they have the time.
Screw ’em. You cannot negotiate with these people. The only thing they understand is death. GdC is correct, they have the time. Well it is time we got the f^ck out. Somewhere in this Country is a young person born on 9 Sep 01 that will be joining the military on 12 Sep 19. Get us out before that person finishes their training and is deployed to that sh^thole tarbaby place. Trump is doing the right thing. He gave the bastards a chance to sit down and talk and they blew up more people, including some of ours. Our history is replete with failed negotiations. Sometimes you have to know when to fold them and just walk away. Unless we use true scorched Earth policies and bring every weapon we have to bear, we will never “win” this war, or any other “war” in the entire ME. If we are there to keep their terrorists out of our country, then just completely seal our borders. If we are there for any potential minerals, then fine, start strip mining the hell out of the place. If we don’t, then the Chinese will.
I ask again, how much more American Blood and Treasure must we piss away over there? How many on just this site have made multiple deployments over there? What is the body count? What have we accomplished? Yeah, we supposedly got Osama, has it been worth it? Bring our boys and girls home, load up the skies with drones and blast hell out of every single one of the Talibans. While we’re pulling our equipment out, load up every Muslim in this country on the out bound birds and ships and deport them back to their sandbox. We are ALL infidels, and their religion specifically tells them to kill those that will not convert. We have been played long enough.
Oh shit…..
18 year olds joining the military now weren’t alive for 9/11.
Dude…..
I need to lie down for a while.
Eh, napalm the entire region and be done with it.
Let’s not forget that Afghans will change sides at the drop of a hat, even in the midst of a firefight. Two, Afghanistan is also known as “The Graveyard of Empires”, just ask the British, French and the Russkies, maybe it’s time to let Chins have a punch at that huge Tar Baby?
If you mean China, they’ve been there strip-mining for over a decade, at least. Same as they do in Africa.
They pay money to whoever they need to in order to go in and take whatever they want and they don’t get attacked, don’t get bothered, don’t have any troubles there. But the amount of money they are paying Afghan elements is a tiny fraction of what they are making off the resources they take home.
I would love to see not only how the Chinese would fare there, but also to see how brutal they would suppress the Taliban.
You know the Russians tried that already, right? They were brutal as fuck and still got their asses handed to them.
The Russians never really seriously applied themselves in the Af. Had they done war the way they did against Germany, they would have been successful. Instead they did it the way we did in Vietnam in the early stages, and never really fought to win. As for the Chinese, they could FLOOD that country with Chinamen, and while their army isn’t all that good, as Stalin said, there is a quality in quantity.
For once, you have a partial point. The Russians were indeed brutal in Afghanistan. But they were pikers compared to the Chinese.
Mao once let 50M of his own population starve for political reasons. He also brushed off a possible nuclear exchange with the USSR with a statement to the effect that China would replace the estimated 100M casualties in a generation.
The Chinese learned brutality firsthand from the Mongols when they were conquered, and learned even more during the time the Mongols ruled China. For an example of Mongol brutality, check out what Ghengis Khan did to various cities in Central Asia.
If China were to want to take Afghanistan, I suspect it would turn out much like Xinjiang: a military takeover, followed by a slow replacement of the population via ethnic Chinese colonization of the desirable areas coupled with a slow (but brutal) genocidal campaign against the current Afghan population.
The Chinese aren’t having a helluva lot of problems keeping a lid on the Uighur population in Xinjiang. My guess is they’ve considered going into Afghanistan, but decided the diplomatic and financial cost just isn’t worth it – for now.
Exactly, let them both bleed and sit back on the sidelines munching on some popcorn. Like Kissinger allegedly said about the Iran-Iraq Way, “It’s a shame they both can’t lose.” Also, don’t send aid to any alleged “freedom fighters”.
Can’t negotiate with the criminaly insane.
The Chinese have been eyeing Afghanistan for some time now in regard to the rare earths and mineral deposits in the mountains of that pisshole they call a country. We have deposits of our own, right here in this country, but the ecohippies don’t want that stuff mined because ‘environment’, etc. The ecohippies and millennials want their toys but they don’t give a flying fart in space how much damage occurs when the stuff that makes up their toys is mined by China. They just don’t want that done here.
If that isn’t hypocrisy at its most blatantly obvious, then what is it?
Let’s be honest. We aren’t going to be getting anything useful done in Afghanistan and we’re wasting money and resources hanging around. Next year or the year after, you’re going to have soldiers deployed to Afghanistan who weren’t born when we started campaigning there. Nobody in the State Department or the Pentagon seems to be willing to describe what an attainable victory looks like, or how to realistically get from here to there.
How much is enough?
So yeah, kudos to President Trump for trying… but I think there’s no real way to ‘do a deal’ here that the other side is going to live up to.
Time to pack it in. Just declare that it’s no longer in our national interest to send young Americans halfway around the world to chase subliterate goat herders around.
Either fish or cut bait. Need decisive and complete victory or get the F out. All this hearts and minds crap ain’t working for us. These people will always hate us.
By the same token, there’s a generation of Pashtun males that have lived in an occupied country since birth.
Getting out will be tricky. I’m sure the Afghans are looking forward to another march to Jalalabad, or Panjshir Valley. They’ve always liked a good egress.
We won’t be able to count on the ANA to cover our backs.
Turn that shithole into a parking lot in a week!
They will always hate us and try and kill us, remember, they are a peace loving religion, and they will always try and kill us? Some peace loving isn’t it?? Blow all those goat fuckers up in a week and be done with it! Nothing in that shithole is worth one American life! Get the fuck out now and get it over with!!!
I have to agree with the prevailing wisdom here. Anything we were going to “win” in Afghanistan we won in the first year. We knocked the Taliban out of power, destroyed the terrorist training camps and basically put the worst Islamic terrorists on the run.
It’s hard to plan an attack when you have to move your base every 4 – 5 days to avoid getting a JDAM or a Predator drone hellfire missile through your front door.
“Nation building” sounds like a great plan but if the Afghan people don’t want their country to be civilized, we aren’t going to be able to make them want it.
I’m not saying we didn’t achieve anything in Afghanistan, I think we did. But long ago we reached the limits of what military power alone can achieve. It’s time to make an orderly withdrawal and to let the Afghans figure out what kind of country they want to have.
As long as they understand that if terrorists again start building training camps in their failed state, we will not hesitate to stomp a mudhole into them and into anyone who is unfortunate enough to be in the near vicinity.
As for those who fear a Jalalabad style massacre, or even a humiliating helicopters-on-the-roof evacuation, I don’t see either one happening. The enemy in Afghanistan may be vicious and clever, but they aren’t organized enough to mount a large scale attack like that.
They’re pikers compared to their ancestors and their military capabilities are orders of magnitude BELOW what the NVA had in 1975.
I would hope Trump is telling his security advisor to have the withdrawal plan on his desk by the end of the year, at the latest.
He should have it there by Hallowe’en.
An interesting CI OP would be to share hard exit plans with our ANA “allies” and see how fast those plans get shared with the taliban, and to what effect. It’s in the ANA’s best interest to sell us out and prove their allegiance to the new masters. Their price has always been a lot lower than “I will allow you to live”.
If you start a pool on this one, I’ll take the “5 minutes” option.
One problem with counterinsurgency wars like this is that the terms “win” and “lose” don’t have the same meaning they do in a “conventional” war.
In the Olden Tymes, to “lose” a war was sobering stuff: The king would lose his head, the losing soldiers would be put to the sword, and the women and children of the losing side would be sold into slavery. The wealth of the losing nation would be taken by the victors, their works destroyed, crops confiscated, etc.
So before we hang our heads about “losing” in Afghanistan, let’s consider that in a war like this, there’s no practical difference to us between “winning” and “losing” except that “winning” means we incur a never-ending obligation to spend blood and treasure trying to achieve some kind of stable society that Afghanistan never really had and likely never will have.
It’s not like the “victorious” Taliban are going to parade down Pennsylvania avenue, whipping their prisoners in front them and demanding that Melania and Ivanka be turned over to them as sex slaves while the Taliban flag waves over the capitol and the members of Congress are crucified on the National Mall.
In a “loss”, our lives only get better because we’re no longer sending our young men and women and giant truckloads of American cash into the abyss, while Afghanistan just sinks back to the shithole it was.
Tell the Taliban that if they want to be King of this particular shit pile, they’re welcome to it. We’ll go back to our air conditioning and our nicely manicured lawns and they can all bugger each other silly if that’s what they’re into (spoiler alert: it is.)
^word^
We know what the cost of losing is, for we only have to look at the Brits and the Russians for examples. I agree with you; the cost of losing is far more affordable than the cost of winning. We should GTFO. No roundtable talks necessary. Afghanistan: YOUR FIRED.
The Taliban et al. claim that God wants them to establish his kingdom (caliphate) in Afghanistan and the world. He even put it in writing.
How do you negotiate with that? Tell the Taliban to ignore the will of God, that He won’t mind? Tell them that God changed his mind, that he really loves infidels and wants them to rule?
Crap.