Ottomaton I agree with you. HOwever these posters who see Al Qaeda and the Taliban as essentially the same or that the Taliban's main goal in life is protecting Al Qaeda think this way because Bush and now Obama have fed them that line. They are being honest, just deceived.
Not quite. I doubt anyone has enough might to force a stable democratic unified state in the hellhole that we call Afghanistan (to which I firmly agree as of now really isn't a nation), but America possesses more than enough power to force a stable unified state - if the Taliban can create a single unified state, than so can we. It doesn't matter that the Taliban and Al Qaeda have different goals today, especially since I kind of don't think that the Taliban are suddenly not going to be a terrorist-sponsoring, Islamist nutjob group if they get back into power, especially after defeating the most powerful country in the world. The Taliban have to be destroyed to send a message - "sponsor terrorist groups that kill American civillians and we will sincerely screw you over." That simple.
I am inclined to agree with you. And to those who say we have not achieved victory, that is complete bunk. The USA has effectively SMASHED Al Qaeda and ran them out of Afghanistan altogether. In fact, we have been so effective at it that the all the foreign fighters (that would be Al Qaeda, yes) ran and crossed the border into Pakistan, which USA intel itself ACKNOWLEDGES is where they are today. Want to know who is remaining in Afghanistan? Well why that would be the Taliban, which is made up of NATIVES and that is why they will never leave or go anywhere, because they are part of Afghani tribal cultures. What would happen if we leave is they would duke it out with other powerful tribes and the stronger one will eventually rule some of Afghanistan, while continually fighting others for it (just like the Taliban did not have total control over Afghanistan, with the Northern Alliance controlling part of the northern side of the country). The problem is we are trying to create a central government over a non-nation, with no real history of ever being a united nation. Heck, look at Pakistan! They are a nuclear power with FAR more military power and a giant security apparatus and they too have different tribes effectively running different parts of the country, with the federal government controlling the major cities and areas inbetween. I dont mean to sound like an as$hole, but seriously who thinks using military force and untold hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money to force Afghanis into educating their women or not beheading adulterers in soccer stadiums? This is a job for soft power and diplomacy, you simply do not risk American blood and treasure for such things. I mean seriously people, give me a break! WE HAVE ALREADY ACHIEVED OUR OBJECTIVE IN AFGHANISTAN! Our goal was: destroy Al Qaeda and deny them a safe haven. Well, we have! Now the Taliban are saying we want nothing to do with Al Qaeda, just get out and leave us alone. What we CAN do is keep our options open and tell them that we would bomb them back to the stone age if we EVER even suspect that they have Al Qaeda on their soil again. Something tells me they would never take that risk ever again. We can always reserve the right to fly predator planes over their country for the foreseeable future to make them realize we were serious. There are a whole host of options here, and I dont think it would be showing any weakness if the original OBJECTIVE has been accomplished. We will still keep bombing targets in Pakistan anyways so they pressure will stay on. Also, and this is important, there is no guarantee at ALL that Taliban will be back in power. In fact, I would bet that eventually a coalition of warlords would come to rule and fight off the Taliban to keep them at bay, since the majority of Afghanis are still opposed to the Taliban returning, they just wont fight them until we leave because they dont like us that much either. It is not by any stretch of the imagination a given that the Taliban would be back in power. I would wager on them never again being a dominating player in Afghanistan, even without us there.
I know I am going to sound like a right winger saying this, but even though we went in there to eradicate al queda it doesn't do the afghan people any good by letting the taliban take over. Most people don't realize how bad these people are, and nobody likes them, pakistan is already dealing with it as the taliban have caused the coutnry to shutdown schools, colleges etc b.c they are threatning to blow them up. I know it isn't something we are obligated to do, but moral standing requires for me to pray that we kill every one of these bastards. They lock the women inside the houses, don't let girls goto school, promote a backwards middle ages type of lifestyle and make everyone's life hell.
I agree with most of your posts but i have to disagree due to reason you probably are not aware of. If the taliban were to regain control of afgh. its going to make it harder for pakistan to regain control of its country, there is a taliban uprising over there at the moment. Geographically, it will be hell for them and they would likely fall. If they were to get their hands on a nuke, you really think they wouldn't threaten anyone?
Pakistan has never had control of the NWFP. Never. They did have a workable compromise, until the US military got involved in Af/Pak. If you want Pakistan to return the Taliban elements back to the NFWP, the appropriate action is to remove the American stick that is currently stirring up the hornet's nest, not to rattle the American stick around in the nest a whole bunch to try and scare the hornets. The US is the reason the Taliban is threatening the Pakistani nukes, not the solution. That having been said, if the Pakistani nukes were being threatened by the Taliban, the US and Pakistanis have high priority plans in place to keep anybody from getting and assembling the Pakistani nukes.
They are not the same thing, Afghani Taliban is not Pakistani Taliban, with the former actually being friendly with the government of Pakistan. Like the article mentions, the Taliban in Pakistan are different from the Afghani Taliban. The Taliban in Pakistan are people who live in the tribal areas of Pakistan and are actively fighting against the Pakistani government because of its intrusion into their previously autonomous lifestyle, and because it allows American planes to bombard them at will. Those people and Al Qaeda ARE intertwined and they share a common goal: bringing down the Pakistani government. On the flip side, the Afghani Taliban was and has always been the brainchild of the ISI (Pakistan's powerful intelligence agency), and in fact the ISI by all accounts is still the primary lifeblood and supporter of the Afghani Taliban, with whom they share a strategic objective (I think Pakistan calls it strategic depth, meaning giving them wiggle room against their archenemy India). According to USA sources themselves, the Afghani Taliban is desperately seeking to distance itself from the Pakistani Taliban-Al Qaeda alliance and their war against the ISI, which again was initially responsible for creating, arming and supporting them until they took power in Afghanistan, and by admission from USA sources they ISI is still doing to this very day. In that region of the world, everything is more complex than it seems.
The Pakistani public doesn't think the Taliban is real. They will tell you that all the internal unrest is India and Blackwater. Really. I couldn't make something like that up. So if they refuse to believe they even exist, I can't imagine that they are feeling too terrorized by them. But the Taliban is self-limiting. It is a bas-ackward tribal Pashtun philosophy that can not be implemented on non-tribal and philosophically different Punjabis. It has about as much chance of taking off with these people as democracy and women's rights have with the Pashtun mountain men.
The Taliban were accomplices in 9/11. Your buddy Omar there hung out with Bin Laden and refused to turn him over. They harbored Al Qaeda and supported them. To think that with their values and anti-American bent that they are not a threat to our National Security...I mean, I can't understand how people forget that the attacks were planned from within Afghanistan which was run by the Taliban at the time. The Taliban knew it was coming. They were aware of what was happening within their borders and they helped out even. And you want us to negotiate? Let them have power? No way. Never. If Obama makes peace with the Taliban, he's completely lost it. Thank goodness he knows better.
This too. Being worried about Pakistani nukes falling into Taliban or Al Qaeda hands is like worrying about Israeli nukes falling into Hamas' hands. Both are completely unrealistic and amount to nothing more than irrational fear. Yet EVEN in the extremely remote chance that it does happen (something like 0.0000000000000000001% I am guessing) there are already contingency plans in place to secure them at any cost. So that cannot be a legitimate reason put forth in support of such a position. The Waziristan problem will go away immediately as soon as the USA stops bombing them and the Pakistani government agrees to go back to the same arrangement that has always existed in regards to the tribal areas: live and let live. The problem is that we have been so successful in Afghanistan that these Al Qaeda fighters fled into the tribal areas of Pakistan and they forced American and Pakistani hands in bombing and raiding their villages to capture or kill high priority targets.
It sounds all good to say that, but how do the Afghan people view those that have come to help them, that would be something to think about. It’s a little more complicated than that, especially when discussing Pakistan. BTW the Taliban comprises of many different tribes, not all of them share the same values... Ah, what do you expect from a country that has been through so much crap in their history...wiping out a group of people because they haven’t moved forward is not the way to solve things, the way you put it above, that is what you will have to do. (Keep in mind many nations have a dark history)
Do you know that the Taliban are guilty of genocide? I'm not talking about 9/11 - I'm talking about the Hazara. The Taliban make the Iran and even Saddam seem civilized. They make Saudi Arabia look like a feminist nation. These guys INVITED bin Laden into their country. They FOUGHT with Bin Laden. They took money from him, and they KNEW about 9/11 before it happened. They REFUSED to extradite Bin Laden for the crimes he committed before 9/11. This really upsets me that people say the Taliban are no threat and are not to be brought to justice. It's just messed up.
I will just say that the USA has long wanted to play a security role regarding Pakistan's nuclear program, mostly to keep an eye on it (read intel gathering) and ensure that no proliferation is taking place. Naturally, a repeated claim of Pakistani nukes being somehow 'unsafe' would seek to justify USA involvement in guarding those nukes, and therefore make it easier for the USA to have an insider role and keep a watchful eye on Pakistan's nuclear program. Failing that, inspectors are usually a good way to spy on another country's nuclear program. So some of those analysts you see could either be misinformed or intentionally self-serving
Actually they are exactly like Saudi Arabia. All their Wahhabist ideas like "morality police" were ripped off from our second favorite middle eastern ally. In the grand range of things, the Taliban rests right between the Saudis killing Houthis and the Sudanese programs of population eradication. Since we've not invaded either Saudi Arabia or Sudan, I wonder why 'getting' the Taliban is so much more of a focus. And Sinn Fein knew about bombings in England. The PLO/Fatah knew all about terrorism in Israel. Both of those parties, nevertheless entered negotiations. At least for the Taliban, it was a marriage of convenience. The Taliban needed the Cash. The IRA/PLO really believed in the idea of killing British/Israelis. And if you take a really close look at the US/Taliban negotiations about extraditing bin Laden in the context of the Pashtunwali (see nanawatai), you will discover that if the USA displayed a little more wisdom about the people with whom they were negotiating, they might have had more success. Instead, the same bluster and outrage that you seem to be so caught up in resulted in a decade of bin Laden running free and taunting America. Typical fuzzy thinking. Whether they are a threat or not, and whether they should be brought to justice or not are separate issues. There are plenty of people in this world who deserve to be brought to justice. The issue of practicality is at the center. Your obsessive focus on the Taliban and ignoring all the others strikes me as absurd. You know what? I really, really hate blood sucking mosquitoes. In an ideal world, we could legitimately advocate a program where every mosquito in the wild should be "brought to justice" through a global eradication program until they are made extinct. Unfortunately, while that is nice in theory, it is simply impractical in the real world. Instead of running out and throwing time and effort into an impossible problem, in cities around the USA we understand that the only practical course of action is focused application of resources at critical times in order to mitigate and control the problem. We understand that there are many critical problems that need constant attention, and focusing on one to the exclusion of all others is a recipe for disaster. You keep going on and on about what "needs to be done". I have yet to see a single word from you indicating that it is possible or practical. And this isn't even going to go into the fact that most of the "Taliban" are not some sort of separate distinct group of mustache-twirling religious villains as you seem to think. Everybody in Afghanistan with a beef with the government gets a gun and calls himself "The Taliban" Specifically, read any stories about recruiting for "The Taliban" in the Korangal Valley. Can you articulate who? And by who, I'm specifically excluding from the list journalists who don't know anything at all about the situation but want a big headline, and former infantry officers from the Vietnam War or self-proclaimed "former CIA analysts" from Fox News who have never been to Pakistan and don't know the first thing about the country, their nuclear weapons or the protective measures the USA has helped implement.
Just because the US has a sordid history of allying with dictators or generally ignoring genocide does not mean that the one time the US got it right, they should just give up.
So what? Why does that matter? We're not at war in Afghanistan to build democracy or protect woman's rights or some other stuff. We are in Afghanistan to crush Al Qaeda and destroy the Taliban. That's it. The other stuff is a waste of our time. The problem to me for withdrawal is right now to what degree are the above two destroyed, as frankly it's really really hard to tell from my perspective. I think the best way to tell is when we have a stable (not democratic) government put into place and a general increase in order. All right, I'll state something I sincerely believe, which will probably piss you off: When a country that has no relevance to American interests commits genocide solely towards her own people, the United States has no business going to war. The important thing to do in the field of international relations is to preserve American power. That is the penultimate objective, not the spread of democracy or feminism or some other sentimental claptrap. And running around charging after every nasty altercation that the idiotic species known as man does is going to do nothing more than exhaust us, so that when the time comes when we might have to face a true threat to ourselves. Iraq and Afghanistan are bad enough - imagine having to run around in Sudan or Zimbabwe or wherever too. It's simply not the effort and strain on our society. Or to go along with this point what we should be doing. We keep toying around with this incompetent, weak, democratic regime, we lose. The current policy needs to change, and withdrawal is a very real possibility.
Saudis haven't committed genocide or beheadings in soccer fields my friend. Big difference. They also didn't harbor and provide safe haven to the 9/11 terrorists. As someone pointed out to me - here's a link to show more about the nuke situation: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/world/asia/04nuke.html It's a scary situation there - inspectors can't figure out if people in there are taliban sympathizers or not. Who knows what happens if the gov't collapses. No ONE! DOn't tell me those nukes are secure. If the Taliban only want peace, wtf are they trying to obtain nukes? For what purpose? You think they wouldn't hesitate to hand them over to Al Qaeda? Omar and Bin Laden are more than financial partners, their families are tied together by marriage. C'mon, are you really telling me that you think that Taliban are just like the IRA?????
