Peace Talks in Afghanistan
Peace talks on Afghanistan are currently underway. But there are disputes and the two Big Mahoffs in Afghanistan are butting heads over who’s in charge and who isn’t.
From the article: But the Taliban have been refusing to talk with the Kabul government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah. The two are currently fighting over who won last year’s presidential elections. The initial vote count gave Ghani the win but Abdullah, who came in second, is contesting the count. A final outcome has yet to be announced by Afghanistan’s election commission.
Last September, the Taliban and the U.S. appeared close to signing a deal when an upsurge in Taliban attacks, including the killing of another U.S. soldier, prompted President Donald Trump to scrap the talks. On Thanksgiving, during his first visit to U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Trump softened his stance, saying the Taliban were ready to make a deal, though both Kabul and Washington insisted the Taliban would have to show a sign of good faith by reducing their attacks.
In December, the Taliban leadership headquartered in Pakistan agreed to put forth a temporary cease-fire offer. – article
Waiting to see how this works out for all involved. My inner cynic says it will work until perceived insults start.
Category: Afghanistan
IMHO it’s past time for us to bow out and leave. I’ve BTDT in A-stan and it convinced me that a lot of those people CANNOT be civilized, they’ll say one thing at the table and be shooting at each other as soon as they’re outside if not sooner.
Imma wid you API. I haven’t BTDT, but I have studied history and I have mourned for every one of our boys and girls that have suffered there. I do have family and friends that have BTDT and it is way yonder past the time that we GOT THE F^CK OUT! What we can’t pull out, blow it up in place or nuke it from orbit. Let the Chinks play with that tar baby for awhile. Maybe when the Chinks use their tried and true methods of population control the Afghans may appreciate what we tried to do for them. But I doubt it!
YES, let the Chinese have that Tar Baby, Afghanistan is not known as “The Graveyard of Empires” for nothing, just ask the Brits, French and the Russkies!
Well said!
Even if they manage to get to a point to where the biggest meanest group takes firm control over there, they will not be finished. A common goal, among those fighting each other, is to ultimately export sharia throughout the world. This was mentioned in the book Holy War Incorporated, and it’s repeated today in interviews with their leaders. This objective hasn’t changed since Islam expanded beyond the Arabian Peninsula.
This objective isn’t restricted to those fighing in Afghanistan, but extends to radical terrorist fighters throughout the Middle East and elsewhere. They want to export what they have over there to the rest of the world. Our not willing to fight as long as they have will just mean that the whole world will end up being like Afghanistan in the future… This time with groups fighting each other globally a la Afghanistan/Middle East due to lack of agreement on whose version of Islam is right.
The only gain we have in bowing out is to ensure that our time period becomes known as “the golden age of the past”… And the saying, “Rome did not fall until her freedmen gave up the will to fight” would be replaced with, “Humanity fell from its civilizational peak when the Americans gave up the will to fight.” That’s if we remember the saying referencing the Romans, as by then we will be in a new medieval period.
God will continue bringing down the mountains and elevating the valleys.
“bringing down the mountains”
There’s your answer right there.
And then make the rubble bounce.
And just to pile on API®™’s comment, I’ll just leave this here…
The Taliban is a lose organization that have no real control over all its members.
Even if the leadership signs a treaty they cannot enforce it on all its members, so the war will continue.
The Taliban IS the control over it’s members, and has complete control (via death for non-compliance) over those underfoot. Not exactly a friendly form of government. Afghans generally give not one fuck about a central government, they’re quite content to have localized tribal control under a patriarchal warlord. They’ll never have peace, that’s a foreign concept to them. Our best bet is to fence in the whole country and sell them all the weapons they can afford. We might as well turn a profit of the place.
Middle Eastern folks are different, one issue is loyalty. Loyalty to one’s family is usually first followed by Tribal loyalty, thus as far as establishing a National Government and Military, it’s not like in the USA. Someone from deep in the Pashtun Belt couldn’t give two fucks of a cockroach shit about what’s going on in Kabul or elsewhere and likewise any other combination plus the deep seated corruption endemic to that part of the world!
IOW it’s like every other “institution” in Afghanistan.
Also, the notion of two people fighting over who gets to become “president” of that failed state makes me think of two drunken rednecks fighting over who holds the title to the rusty, broken down pickup truck on cinder blocks in the front yard.
Or perhaps a better metaphor would be two bitter ex-spouses fighting over the deed to a house that’s on fire.
Fuck that place– they do that shit for fun there without us being involved anyway.
It’s beyond the time we should just destroy all the equipment that we can’t carry and evacuate overnight.
Let the Chinese have THEIR turn dealing with that black hole of military resources. We and the Russians found out there’s no winner but the mullahs and warlords.
Here’s an interesting thing to note. Afghanistan in the sixties and seventies was actually pretty decent in the cities. There are photos of women in Western dress and nice buildings.
My suggestion is to find some local warlord who wants to have that kind of Afghanistan, and cut him a deal. We have a base for our forces to drop the pain on terrorist bastards, he gets backup. Everything else we stop patrolling or caring about except to kill terrorist scumbags.
Meanwhile, Afghans who don’t want a country that sucks can hang out around our base and with our bro warlord.
Basically, I support this kind of strategy around the middle east. Make mutually beneficial deals with low-level dudes, set up bases so we can keep ISIS 2.0 from growing, and hang out with people who actually like us.
That idea is fun to contemplate, but the Soviet invasion put that in its coffin and the years of Warlord and Taliban rule nailed that coffin shut!
The difficulty with that strategy is that the low-level warlords we’d cut a deal with are not, generally speaking, good guys or people with any sense of “civic duty” as we understand it in the Western world.
Hitching our wagons to their star would spell bad news for us. Sooner or later said warlord would (a) massacre a bunch of innocent people (b) rough up some journalists or aid workers (c) initiate oppressive measures against his “own people” (d) make common cause with drug dealers or terrorists or (e) a combination of all of the above, and when he does, our support for that warlord becomes an albatross around OUR neck with the demand that “WE” fix the problem that “WE” created through our support for the warlord.
Nope, nope, nope. We don’t want our fingerprints on that particular gun. It’s high time we cut our losses, removed what equipment we can, turn over expendable goodies to whoever happens to be in charge, and GTFO, with the stern warning that should we have to come back in, there will be no “nation building”, just a lot of “kill people and break stuff.”
The words of Clell Hazard, the character played by James Caan in the movie “Gardens of Stone” regarding Vietnam seem appropriate here: When the idealistic young soldier talks about “winning” in Vietnam, Hazard replies that there is “Nothing to win and no way to win it.”
I don’t think there’s a lot of difference between Pakistan and Afghanistan now and, what they were like as colonies of the British Empire. Pakistan now was West Pakistan then.
– The First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–1842) led to the British force taking and occupying Kabul. After this, due to strategic errors by Elphinstone, the entire British-led Indian invasion force was defeated by Afghan forces under Akbar Khan somewhere at the Kabul-Jalalabad Road, near the city of Jalalabad.[3] After this defeat, the British-led forces returned to Afghanistan on a special mission to rescue their prisoners of war (POWs) and afterward withdrew until coming back in order to commence the Second Anglo-Afghan War.
The Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–80) first led to the British defeat followed by their victory at the Battle of Kandahar, which led to Abdur Rahman Khan becoming the new emir and the start of friendly British-Afghan relations. The British were given control of Afghanistan’s foreign affairs in exchange for protection against the Russians and Persians. The Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919 led the British to give up control of Afghanistan’s foreign affairs finally in 1921. – Wiki
They really haven’t changed at all, and probably never will. And if they want to bump each other off, why are we interfering with it? Just trying to understand this, since they’ve never done anything except try to kill each other off.