Saturday, October 22, 2016

Is Now The Time To Negotiate With The Taliban?


William Goodfellow, US News and World Report: There's No Military Solution in Afghanistan

History offers lessons for finally ending the conflict with the Taliban.

This month marks the 15th anniversary of the start of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Rather than ending the war before he leaves office, as he had promised, President Barack Obama is escalating America's involvement in the war.

The Pentagon has deployed special operations troops to support the Afghan army and, for the first time since 2006, has sent B-52 bombers back to Afghanistan to bomb Taliban insurgents. While the bombing has temporarily slowed the Taliban offensive in Helmand province, strategic bombing is unlikely to defeat a resilient guerrilla force that is steadily gaining ground on an Afghan government weakened by corruption and infighting.

Read more ....

WNU Editor: This is just an acknowledgement that the war is lost, and that the time is now to find a mechanism that would incorporate the Taliban to run the country. Unfortunately .... I do not think this proposal would not work. Afghanistan is a country with multi-ethnic and sectarian groups .... who have a long and bloody history with the Taliban. They would never accept the Taliban coming back to power, and the Taliban have shown no history in the past to share power with them. Bottom line .... if the Taliban do come back to power .... it would probably produce a refugee crisis that would pale in comparison to what is happening in the Middle East today. But it is also true that at the moment there is no military solution to the war .... and that a new strategy must be found.

2 comments:

Stephen Davenport said...

You are one of these glass half empty kind of guys..lol..as usual another article that exaggerates what really is happening in Afghanistan. The truth is we are neither winning nor losing there, that is a fact. It's a stalemate, we do not want to do what is necessary to win, thus the half measures we see there and other places like Iraq and Syria. We could win by military force but we won't because we have the pre-ww2 pacifist mentality, "peace in our time" crowd running things. When someone says we cannot win militarily then we already lost and its sad and people lose their lives by tens of thousands.

Jordan said...

The same as I have been thinking and saying as of late, Stephen. The Neville Chamberlain crowd is running things currently. Well said.