Please spell this out for me. Why are peace talks between Karzai and the Taliban and/or the Pakistanis pleasing?
Do you have reason for thinking that the interests of the United States and the reasons why we started the war in Afghanistan will be furthered at these talks?

I point you all to a great a href=http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/23612315/how_we_lost_the_war_we_won/print>Rolling Stone story on how Afghanistan IS lost and nothing Bush OR OBAMA can do will change that fact. Hopefully, Obama will see the writing on the wall and not try some dumbass surge thingy for Afghanistan. If he does, he will be doing what Nixon did when he inherited Vietnam from LBJ: making things worse and STILL losing.

The “Taliban” at this time are really generic Pashtuns and the “insurgency” is a run-o-mill fight against an occupier. Pashtuns are about 30% of Afghan population, and evenly split between Afghanistan & Pakistan (courtesy of Brits, of course). In Afghanistan the Pashtuns are underrepresented in govt. IIRC, Karzai (who seems to be about as corrupt as they come, but who wouldn’t be in a poppy economy) is Pashtun, but the rest of the govt is heavily Northern Alliance (Abdullah Abdullah included), which are other ethnic groups.

So the problem is political not military, and these talks are the only possibility for coming to a peaceful resolution.

Ab.Ab. seemed to be a reasonably intelligent thoughtful person when he was on cspan in pre- during- and early-govt days.

Also, Hussain Haqqani, a respectable academic, who is a respectable journalist/scholar & is now Pak For Minister, was on cspan recently, giving a speech somewhere. He is very optimistic about the new Pak govt. Now, of course, he’s paid to dispense such propoganda, but the specifics (names of people I don’t remember, diminished role of military, etc.) he talked about gave some credibility to his optimism.

Try again to point you all to a great Rolling Stone story on how Afghanistan IS lost and nothing Bush OR OBAMA can do will change that fact. Hopefully, Obama will see the writing on the wall and not try some dumbass surge thingy for Afghanistan. If he does, he will be doing what Nixon did when he inherited Vietnam from LBJ: making things worse and STILL losing.

I can’t get your link to work.

We can do nothing to fix Afghanistan at this point. The war is lost and cannot be anything but lost – so we can take the ingredients we are presented with and make a cake or eat shit.

Bush so thoroughly botched Afghanistan for the sake of wrecking Iraq that now both are lost (to the PNAC fantasy). Hell, to the neocons, Afghanistan was an unpleasant distraction from their real goal all along, and was just used as a starter for the big game: Iraq, Syria, Iran. Instead of working all flowers and candy, however, the whole shebang is lost with over 4000 pointless US dead and hundreds of thousands pointlessly dead Iraqis and Afghanis. Obama CANNOT fix the mess, he can only get us out of it…or go down with both (if he plays the ME/SW Asia cards wrong, he will be a one-termer along the lines of LBJ).

Thanks. I heard this guy, probably on democracynow. He’s right that it can’t be won as a war. Which is why negotiations and other political measures are the only possibility (no gruaranties of course), and I explained in 3.

I just tried it myself in the corrected second try and got back to the page. It is the printer-friendly version. Here’s the original: http://www.rollingstone.com/ne…..ar_we_won.

There are also photos.

bernhard asks: Talks With Which ‘Taliban’?

one of his links is to China Hand, ‘We’re not going to win this war’. would love to have spencer’s take on this bit:

The US is going to be in Afghanistan for years to come. The only thing that’s going to change in Afghanistan is the objectives.

The Afghan adventure is expensive, onerous, and unpopular, and most of the 40 or so countries participating in the International Security Assistance Force and the host of NGOs trying to better the lives of the downtrodden Afghani people would like to see a new policy. Specifically, one that separates the existential goal of crushing al-Qaeda from the strictly local issue of what political grouping gets to run the failed state of Afghanistan, and tries to slice and dice and co-opt the insurgency instead of pursuing the impossible goal of crushing the Taliban’s entrenched power in Afghanistan’s mountains and countryside.

The world has made its voice heard, and America has apparently listened.

All the indications are that the US military and foreign policy establishment has already abandoned the ambitious neo-conservative objective of crushing the Taliban and remaking Afghanistan as a functioning democracy.

America’s Afghanistan policy is falling into the hands of the realists, whose highest priority is maintaining a tractable and viable client in Kabul, keeping Afghanistan securely inside the US sphere of interest, holding on to a key chess piece in Central Asia’s “great game” of energy resources and pipeline infrastructure, and offering the Pentagon another basing option to bedevil Russia and Iran.

Despite the absurdity of a multi-year, multi-billion dollar entanglement in Central Asia that will do little more than advance unilateral US security objectives, America’s allies will be willing to demonstrate their support for new US leadership after the disastrous George W Bush years, and will probably heed an American call for a redoubled effort in Afghanistan.

The key suppliers of money and manpower to the NATO effort in Afghanistan – Great Britain, Canada, Germany, and Australia – are all under administrations that have made continued engagement in Afghanistan a cornerstone of their foreign policies but now demand a fundamental change in course.

With a broad international consensus on Afghanistan, the US will now seek to impose a firm hand on the emerging policy process – and prepare public opinion still mired in the obsolete death-match-versus-the-Taliban-and-al-Qaeda mindset pursued over the past six years at the cost of thousands of lives and tens of billions of dollars for a brave new world in which the Taliban enter the government and Afghan democracy goes out the window.

Time is of the essence – in order to halt the military decline inside Afghanistan and to co-opt a burgeoning non-US peace initiative for the region that might pre-empt US direction of the effort in Afghanistan. Otherwise, control of the terms of engagement in confronting Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgency might slip from America’s fingers.

nir rosen is at the new america foundation (steve clemens). i’ve also heard him on democracy now! – most recent appearance, i think, was a couple of weeks ago on his rolling stone article: “How We Lost the War We Won: A Journey into Taliban-Controlled Afghanistan”

I would like to thank you gentlemen for your responses. Ignorant as I am, I stilll don’t understand. I thought that our objectives in being in Afghanistan were to close out the alQaeda bases and to apprehend tha alQaeda leadership. Toppling the Taliban was seen as necessary to achieve the base closings. I assume that our continued presensce is in order to effect kill/capture of alQaeda currently in Pakistan.
Other than alQaeda related activity, I don’t understand us to have ANY real interest or objectives in Afghanistan. Events have led us into various interests in Pakistan.
BUT I don’t understand how we can lose the war in Afghanistan unless we allow a government that harbors/arms/trains men who will attack our interests and citizenry.