Talks with Taliban Collapse

Fox News Live (no link) | 10/2/12

[RicocheT]

Sort of an infinitely reusable headline:

Talks With Palestinians Taliban Collapse

[TexasRepublic]

Short of killing everyone over there, the Taliban will remain a problem.

[Wuli]

we went into secret negotiations with Taliban - through 3rd parties - and Karzai, as the titular Afghan leader complained, rightly

sensing Obama would leave no matter what anyway

the Taliban played Obama like an old guitar, never intending to come to an agreement, and played for time

meanwhile, I suspect, that Karzai has been attempting his own secret negotiations with the Taliban, trying to preserve his own life after the U.S. leaves by attempting some sort of even more grand “unity” government, including the Taliban and believing, like an idiot, that doing so will avoid the civil war the Taliban will create in their own repeat of the 1990s war for supreme and sole power in Afghanistan

I don’t know who is the bigger idiot in all this, Karzai or Obama.

On the other hand, two U.S. administrations have allowed so much politics to intrude on the military mission in Afghanistan that, outside of re-initiating the whole thing from scratch, I don’t think the mission can possibly be rescued, and that propsoect cannot obtain the backing of even a plurality of Americans. At this point I would prefer that not another American dies in Afghanistan in a war that American politics, not American military prowess, has lost.