Human Events has a demoralizing story on how our President Obama and British Prime Minister Cameron are desperately trying to cut a peace deal with those Islamic savages better known as the Taliban.
The story talks about some of the concessions that Obama and Cameron have made to the Taliban to get them to the peace table. To get them to the table, our boys have conceded that the Taliban don’t have to stop the killing of our soldiers or civilians, they don’t have to break with al-Qaeda, they and, they don’t even have to recognize the Afghan constitution.
And what have Obama and Cameron received in return? They got the big middle finger in their face and little more. Last week there was to be a negotiating meeting between our side and the Taliban in Germany. The Taliban didn’t show up. This humiliation of our President was all over the European news media just as Obama arrived in Ireland. Did you see anything in our media about this because I didn’t. Here an excerpt from the Human Events story:
Then last week the Taliban humiliated Obama and Cameron during their European summit on Afghanistan. Despite our over- the-top concessions, upper-level Taliban leaders refused to show up at highly publicized “peace” talks in Germany after deciding they didn’t want to, well, talk. (Talks thus far have been with mid-level leaders.) News that the Taliban jilted Obama at the negotiating table filled European papers just as Obama’s entourage hit the continent.
The way the Taliban leaders see it, the Telegraph reports, “They can simply sit it out and wait for victory in 2014,” when troops are scheduled to exit.
Taliban leaders have been openly baffled by the Obama administration’s determination to negotiate peace with them from the beginning.
An aide to Taliban leader Mullah Omar explained the group’s position in November: “All of these reports of peace talks are nonsense,” Mullah Aminullah told NBC News. “This is just propaganda by the U.S. and its NATO allies to hide their defeat on the battlefield. We are winning, why should we negotiate?”
The Taliban has been laughing since Secretary of State Hillary Clinton first proposed negotiating with the “moderate” members of the Taliban in 2009.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid called this a “lunatic idea,” insisting that there were no moderate Taliban.
Can someone please explain to me why we even entertain the idea of negotiating with these animals. What the hell good would a peace treaty with the Taliban be worth? Less than nothing, in my opinion.
With the death of bin Laden we have more than accomplished our original goals in Afghanistan. What are we doing try to “nation build” over there? These people have been fighting for ever. They love to fight against foreigners on their soil. But, if there are no foreigners to fight, they will gladly fight each other. Afghanistan is not worth one more drop of American blood. It is past time to bring our troops home.
Before I move on to the good news from Afghanistan, let me share the last sentence of the Human Events article. It pretty much says it all:
Still Obama and Cameron plow ahead, pushing for what the British papers call a “political solution.” By that they mean one that will make Obama look great … to America’s enemies.
Okay. Are you ready for some good news out of Afghanistan? Well, you are going to love this story. A big Hat Tip to Bruce McQuain of Questions and Observation for his own story and a link to the original story at the Daily Mail. This is a story about Corporal Dipprasad Pun, 31, from the 1st Battalion the Royal Gurkha Rifles. Cpl. Pun was standing guard duty at a forward outpost one night when he heard a noise. He quickly determined that he was surrounded by Taliban insurgents. He surmised that he was about to die so he decided to take as many Taliban with him as he could. After about fifteen minutes when the dust had settled and reinforcements had arrived, Cpl. Pun was found uninjured and out of ammunition and the body count of Taliban was thirty. This is an incredible story. Do checkout both links. Tha Daily Mail link has photos of Cpl. Pun, one of which is of him receiving Conspicuous Gallantry Cross from the Queen. Pay special attention to the size of the man. You have to be impressed.
Asylum Watch 
You’ve identified it for what it is: A fig leave to cover a retreat from a failed policy. We stayed to long.
As usual, our troops fought bravely and did the impossible, while our politicians (including Bush) screwed it up from top to bottom.
Time to cut sling.
Yes. Our politicians including Bush screwed it up big time.
We have sorry Rules of Engagement. We told them when we are leaving. We get stabbed in the back by ‘allies’. We put a band-aid on a broken leg.
It’s not the first time we have had sorry rules of engagement, Otis. It seems we never learn.
We need to bring them home. Obama has no intention of getting serious, it’s just a holding pattern until the next election!
We owe nothing more to the pathetic government of Afghanistan. Leave them to their own misery and maybe spray a little agent orange on their poppy fields on the way out.
Looks like another ‘Nam. As long as we let the politicians run wars, we are doomed to failure. Either blast them to hell or come home.
I say bring them home.
There’s a reason Afghanistan is known as the graveyard of empires.
Yes, and it wasn’t necessary for the US to become part of that legacy. We should have been out of there a long time ago.
For pity’s sake! Obama and Cameron are showing the Islamic world just how weak the West is.
The Taliban are playing them and they don’t even know it.
Yes Afghanistan is the “Graveyard of Empires” for a very simple reason. The location is difficult, harsh and remote, tribalism rules and tribal loyalities rule everything else. You can rule the people in the plains around Kabul but as soon as you involve the tribes in the mountains you are screwed. The tribes will only develop themselves and the interference of outsiders have created the Taliban because smart degenerate Mullahs in the past were willing to usurp their own beliefs to fit into that tribal behaviour and bingo, many of the tribles are now Taliban affiliated and supported.
What readers here do not realise is that the Taliban is an ideology like Al Qaeda and they do not represent Afghanistan as a whole but they are recognised within Afghanistan as being part of the tribal system. Throughout history, any slightest hint of attacking the “tribal system” will cause the ruling groups within the tribes to instantly stick to each other regardless of what they represent.
So when you have a comment above like “showing the Islamic world…..” it is illogical in the scheme of Afghanistan, nonesense when it comes ot the actual “Islamic world” and simply does not make sense even as a phrase. Similary, “those Islamic Savages” is not even correct as written by the author here. They are savage, sure, they are the Taliban, and in the end only the Taliban claim that they are Islamic or representative of it. Even hard-core wahhabists like Al Qaeda are constantly infighting with the Taliban because of their mix of tribalism with their own skewered version of Islam – which is ironic because the Wahhabists do enough skewering.
What should be also remembered here is that blaiming Obama and Cameron is naive, as it was Bush and Blair that started the process and put the rules of what would have to happen later on. To a great degree, Obama and Cameron have their hands tied – pulling the plug in one go also does not work and would show the world that these two countries (the US and Britain) cannot keep their commitments and any agreements with them anywhere else are questioned.
Regardless of your opinions folks, the international community including the US and Britain are committed and recognise the current government in Kabul and if your happy to abandon it simply does not work, especially considering that it was a US and British led coaltion plus many more nations that kicked out the Taliban.
It does make it very much like Vietnam in the sense that military action will not work, the solution is what they are trying to do, as in meeting with the “Tribes” – it is the media and you lot that call them Taliban and weeding out the hard-core and then giving some value to those that do not or are willing not to support the Taliban movement. In the end, the mistake is assuming that tribes in Afghanistan are really Taliban and only a fool will assume that they can win or have even a remote success in that country without accepting that the tribes will no matter what be part of Afghanistan’s future.
Ugly Fringe
I think you are trying to put too narrow a confine on the “World of Islam”, a term you don’t like. That is your problem, in which I have no interest.
I don’t recall any commitment by our two countries to baby sit the Afghan government for ever.
I seem to recall a Brit by the name of Chamberlain who thought he could negotiate with Hitler. Is that what you wish to do with the Taliban? Good luck to you.
Actually it is others that generalize and use the word (or easy excuse) “Islam”.
There is never a “forever” that is obvious, but we should not forget that if we start something then we have obligations and the real problem I see in Afghanistan was that no set agenda or timeframe was set at the beginning to work to, and that most certainly was not Obama.
As for negotiating with “the Taliban”, that in itself is asking for confusion, so I ask you what is the Taliban? If anything, that is lumping way to much into one basket. There is no, for example, real single entity called “The Taliban”. Mullah Omar is the head of the largest politcal group.
The biggest mistake most people make – and I am not pointing fingers at bloggers in general but the media for not bothering to point out the facts, that the term Taliban used by most are in fact dumping together into one grand pile all the tribal Afghani groups in the general Eastern Afghan mountains (and some, all the tribles in Afghanistan). That is a mistake, most of the real Taliban (the politcal militant grouping) is mostly based in one corner of the country.
So when one wishes to deal with and find out who is really a political Taliban supporter and who is just a tribalist whom through connections is supporting the Taliban or assuming out of ignorance that they are at war with “America”, then you can weed them out and even better you have a real target instead of the general population in the mountains.
That is not appeasment which you are very mistakenly confusing and just another historical fact for you to remember, it was not Chamberlain who was the appeaser, it was also the British Parliment, the entire British Labour Party leadership, it was the French Government to almost a person as well as a good majority of the US Congress. Apart from that simple but factual information, appeasment has nothing to do with Afghanistan at all.
And they insist on negotiating with folks that don’t want to negotiate? What morons!
Even assuming they could negotiate a peace agreement with the Taliban, what would it be worth? It is definitely not worth losing one more drop of American blood.