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Afghanistan
The Taliban Is Talking Peace, But Look What They're Doing
2019-03-13
[Hot Air] When we first learned back in January that peace talks with the Taliban were underway, I expressed a number of concerns. The Taliban are murderous, repressive thugs who can’t be trusted for much of anything. But at the same time, I was forced to admit that we were running out of options unless we are willing to concede that we’re going to be in Afghanistan forever, propping up a government that controls a decreasing amount of territory every year.

The peace talks may be continuing, but the Taliban is proving once again that they speak out of two sides of their faces. The Boston Globe reports this week that even as the peace talks are underway, the former rulers of Afghanistan are out there ambushing the government’s military forces. This week they wiped out an entire company.
Taliban fighters killed or captured an entire Afghan National Army company of more than 50 soldiers Monday, Afghan officials said, the latest in a series of major attacks by the militant group even as it pursues a peace deal with the United States.

The attack, in which the Taliban were reported to have killed 16 soldiers and taken 40 prisoners, took place in northwestern Badghis province, close to the country’s western border with Turkmenistan. It came as Taliban negotiators entered a third week of talks with US diplomats in the Persian Gulf kingdom of Qatar.

In the assault, a large force of Taliban insurgents surrounded a base in the Bala Murghab district. After four hours of fighting, the militants captured or killed all of the soldiers in their base, as well as others at two outposts nearby, according to Abdul Aziz Beg, head of the Badghis provincial council.

At this point, the city of Bala Murghab and the surrounding Badghis province in northwestern Afghanistan is essentially lost. Much like many of the other rural provinces, the Taliban have almost completely retaken control and both government forces and American troops can only travel out there in force with any safety. The residents of those regions are effectively back under Taliban rule.

This represents yet another reason that we’re not going to get away with any sort of Nixonian "peace with honor" situation by simply declaring victory and going home. The first victories came when we initially broke the Taliban’s hold on the nation during the first months and years after our arrival and oversaw their (mostly) free and fair elections. The real victory came when OBL was finally shot in the head and dumped unceremoniously into the ocean. (And that didn’t even happen in Afghanistan.)
Posted by:Besoeker

#5  Er the great game is played by getting tribes to fight each other and covertly supporting one side to cleanse the area of troublesome tribes. But the important corollary is to never let one tribe get bigger than the others!
Posted by: Bright Pebbles   2019-03-13 21:39  

#4  Given domestic sensibilities, the way we're forced to fight this war is very different from the Taliban's and that is why we cannot win it.

I should say we cannot win it at a cost acceptable to us - $40b a year for as long as the eye can see. On the other hand, it may make sense to extend a annual stipend of several billion dollars a year to the current Afghan regime. The guy supported by the Soviets actually kept it together right up to the point that they cut off his funding. That stipend will (1) give him and other big men in the regime a fighting chance and (2) force them to strip down their decision-making in a direction that favors winning the war, thereby staying alive.
Posted by: Zhang Fei   2019-03-13 17:44  

#3  Jazz Shaw obviously hasn't read very much history. Peace talks are typically accompanied by ferocious offensives. The point is to pressure the other side to make concessions, and to maximize one's gains before the final ceasefire, after which everyone's supposed to stop armed activity in observance of the final treaty. If our guys are not holding the Taliban's face to a lit stove turned up to maximum, somebody at the White House is not doing his job. And as it turns out, I believe our guys are in fact bombing the heck out of the Taliban. But short of a Chinese style strategy of depopulating enemy sanctuaries via removal, starvation or massacre (the first two of which were features of the the winning of the West), it's hard to see a quick resolution to the war.

You can't just kill the Taliban - you have to kill all the able-bodied men related to the Taliban who could quickly become (or are secretly) Taliban. In wartime, there is no room for beyond a reasonable doubt, even for a country with the biggest economy in the world. Given domestic sensibilities, the way we're forced to fight this war is very different from the Taliban's and that is why we cannot win it. If we fought it like the Taliban, they would already be defeated. Of course, millions of Taliban and suspected Taliban supporters would be lying in mass graves.

There are reasons for our qualms. Rules that are used against foreigners might be used against our own in the event of another civil war. At the same time, they tie our hands in fighting another nation's civil war. While I think it's worthwhile holding to our rules of engagement for big picture domestic reasons, they mean that we need to be realistic about cutting our losses when our local allies in foreign civil wars can't cut the mustard. Our Afghan allies have had huge amounts of aid pumped into their economy. 20 years is long enough.
Posted by: Zhang Fei   2019-03-13 17:36  

#2  Required to by the hudna principle. But it might be useful to follow them home between rounds.
Posted by: trailing wife   2019-03-13 14:18  

#1  nothing new too see here
Posted by: chris   2019-03-13 09:43  

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