Posted on 04/20/2008 7:59:02 PM PDT by LSUfan
Planes, Trains, Armored Trucks, and Afghanistan
Instead of “planes, trains, and automobiles,” my trip from western Nineveh to Mosul, to Erbil, to Vienna, to Stuttgart, to Atlanta, to El Paso, and then to Florida was much more interesting. It included helicopters, armored pickup trucks, trains, buses, cars and numerous jets. And the “fun” has just begun. After Florida there will be Washington, D.C., and then back to the war. As always, I beg forgiveness for the great difficulty I have responding to emails.
In addition to all the travel there is also the endless homework. A big challenge has been finding reliable sources whether they be military, political, or journalistic. I’ve located another source whom I pay attention to regarding Afghanistan. Former British military officer and ITN reporter, Adam Holloway MP is now on the Defence Select Committee. I’ve mentioned Mr. Holloway in my 2006 dispatches on Afghanistan, after having met him on a remote airfield in Afghanistan. He’s a very smart man with an eye for truth about the war: good, bad and the ugly. In Afghanistan it’s mostly the bad and ugly. Mr. Holloway has written an important piece at www.spectator.co.uk. : To bring peace to the Afghans, talk to the Taleban.
What Mr. Holloway is proposing might cause nervous twitches – perhaps spasms – in America and in the United Kingdom. But I know for a fact that he’s paying close attention to Afghanistan. After I first met him there in 2006, I learned through a source that Mr. Holloway financed his own second secret trip to the hinterlands so that he could avoid the dog and pony show of an official visit. In December 2007, when I visited the U.K., an important part of the trip that I have not previously mentioned was that I met with Mr. Holloway numerous times to discuss Afghanistan.
The United Kingdom is a critical partner in the Afghan war. Mr. Holloway’s controversial article deserves serious consideration and discussion. Furthermore, this Member of Parliament is willing to open a direct line to citizen-voices from the United States, and so with his permission, Mr. Holloway’s email address: hollowaya@parliament.uk
I know that Michael has been on the ground and I respect what he has been doing with his coverage in Iraq but anyone who thinks that Taliban will negotiate a state where people live with any sort of freedom is smoking crack.
To bring peace to the Afghans, talk to kill the Taleban.
There; fixed it.
That is crazy talk. You can’t talk with a mad dog, you can only kill it.
Is this from the B. Hussein Obama school of foreign policy?
10-4
I can tell you that the troops with boots on the ground in the Taliban thick hinterlands of Afghanistan who face these miscreants (a much closer fitting name for them than 'terrorist' or 'insurgent') every day - would spit on this report. (I'm not interpreting, nor getting this second hand, but straight from those who are doing the heavy lifting.)
We know there are elements in the UK that want to sit down and chat with the miscreants over a glass of chi - we know that some Brits who were having secret talks with the talies got booted out of the country by Kasai and went home under a cloud...
we know this is what obmamama would want to do, sit around making nicey-nice with the barbarians, while the barbarians would be setting up an ambush for them as they left the meeting and went back to base.
A pox on them all
Yon’s good writer, but he’s a little full of himself. He’s created a persona for himself, that of the two-fisted, post-partisan warrior-writer who tells it like it is, speaks truth to power, doesn’t flinch from unpalatable bad news, etc., etc.
The Brits already talked to the Taliban. They negotiated a truce, and we had to go in and rescue them.
The Pakistanis are currently talking to the Taliban and losing their country acre by acre.
Keep in mind that the Brits ordered their navy to not detain Somali pirates because that would violate their human rights.
These are people who can’t be trusted to negotiate anything except their own demise, and I say this as a confirmed Anglophile. I love the Brits, which is why I’m so depressed at their collapse.
Michael took this line last year. I don’t get it. How do you negotiate with people whose first priority is to kill you?
There were persons in the Taleban - foreign minister, Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, who didn’t like AQ and want the West to get them out.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/2242594.stm
It was from Tohir Yo‘ldosh (various spellings) that had sent 9/11 info and it was him who the US was looking for (recall the BIG target holed up in the mountains beleived to be OBL tat was catured?) U.S.-led coalition’s spring offensive in Afghanistan, codenamed Operation Mountain Storm began on or about March 12, 2004
take your defeatism back to DU, Obama.
Osama’s No. 2 may not be target (Tohir Yo‘ldosh)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1102297/posts
With respect to Mr. Yon, the English are convinced beyond all doubt that they understand both Arabs and Muslims. But what this translates to in the real world is a preconceived notion that there is “an Arab way” and “a Muslim way” that should be respected.
The “Arab way” and the “Muslim way” have been disastrous for them, leaving them under the rule of despots, caught on a path of barbaric primitivism, and with a mood of defeatism and pessimism. If anything, the 20th Century to them was grasping at secularism, and *any* way of living *other* than “the Arab way” and “the Muslim way”.
For them, socialism or even wretched communism was a step up from the pit in which generations had lived in misery and anguish.
What America is trying to bring to the region is heavenly, compared to what they have long suffered. Americans entered the fray with no preconceived notions of who they were facing. Prince or peasant, if they acted honorably, they were our friends. If they acted treacherously, they were our enemies.
Americans cut through thick layers of nonsense and artifice, and brought with them radical new ideas of modernism and efficiency.
Despite what most people think, the siren call of democracy around the world is not freedom and liberty. Its truly irresistible force is that it is a better way of doing just about anything. It is staggeringly efficient compared to any other “way” of living or government.
Everything that America did that was “the American way” has been a smashing success in Iraq. Everything we tried to salvage from the Arab and Muslim way there has been a mess or a disaster. We should have completely rewritten Iraq in our image. Let them change it back years from now if they wanted. But the irony is, they probably wouldn’t want to go back to most anything that is of the Arab or Muslim way.
Moving to Afghanistan, America has made more errors along the way. From the start, their economy was in such a shambles that we could have hired most of the adult males in the country as minimum wage laborers. For a few billion dollars, this immense labor force could have rebuilt much of their ruined nation.
And away from the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the policing up of those villains could have been accomplished with considerable speed. And the Afghans, like the Iraqis, when shown a better way of doing things, will often jump at the opportunity.
More than anything else, that country needed a WPA, to get its economy rolling again, putting money in the pocket of the common man, and food in his, and his families stomachs.
But again, they *don’t* need to do things the Muslim way. They desperately need some other, any other, way of doing things.
The Taliban were the past. Murderous tyrants who ruled by whim and homicide. Those are not people you negotiate with. They are, and always will be, part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Despite what the English think. T.E. Lawrence is long dead. It’s time to let go of their romanticism of both the Arab and the Muslim world. Don’t let their rose colored glasses result in denying them a place in the 21st Century.
Did we talk forever with the SLA?
Actually, now that I think about it, all we have to do is look at the mess the Brits made of Basra to see how “talking to the Taliban” would work out.
In exchange for laying down their arms, the Taliban would demand that they be allowed to treat the Afghans the way the Brits let the Shi’ite fanatics treat the Basrans. The Brits let young women be murdered and raped for not dressing right. Is this what we as Americans want?
No Basra in Afghanistan, I say.
Isn’t this what Bill Clinton did in the years before 911?
My guess is the british MP thinks that the Taliban can be turned against AQ just as the the saudi’s cousin tribes in western anbar were turned against AQ.
this is not an unreasonable proposition.
Good Post!
YOU first, Michael.
“How do you negotiate with people whose first priority is to kill you?”
You don’t.
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