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.
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?
Not crack, but rather the by-product of the poppy fields!