Obama Decides To Make The Taliban Our Friend In Afghanistan
And that’s the perfect solution to all the pressure he’s now facing to, you know, make an effort to win the war in Afghanistan. Remember, Obama said throughout his campaign that Afghanistan was the right war while Iraq was the wrong war. So if he can’t abandon the “right war” without looking like a buffoon at a time when he really can’t afford to look any more buffoonish, he’ll just make the people we’ve been fighting for the last 8 years our friends.
Problem solved, right?
Though aides stress that the president’s final decision on any changes is still at least two weeks away, the emerging thinking suggests that he would be very unlikely to favor a large military increase of the kind being advocated by the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. …
Obama’s developing strategy on the Taliban will “not tolerate their return to power,” the senior official said in an interview with The Associated Press. But the U.S. would fight only to keep the Taliban from retaking control of Afghanistan’s central government — something it is now far from being capable of — and from giving renewed sanctuary in Afghanistan to al-Qaida, the official said. …
Bowing to the reality that the Taliban is too ingrained in Afghanistan’s culture to be entirely defeated, the administration is prepared, as it has been for some time, to accept some Taliban role in parts of Afghanistan, the official said. That could mean paving the way for Taliban members willing to renounce violence to participate in a central government — though there has been little receptiveness to this among the Taliban. It might even mean ceding some regions of the country to the Taliban. …
Obama kept returning to one question for his advisers: Who is our adversary, the official said.
So Obama’s going to take the easy way out. He’s going to make a deal with the devil for the sake of his own political hide.
If you’re wondering why our troops in Iraq are depressed, this is a big reason.
