Good News In Afghanistan?

[STTAB]

Actually, not. Even you should be able to see I've been saying this is wrong for those that have served and all those who've died. Those that went along with serving the 'government' in Afghanistan, those that dealt with us in good faith? The Taliban will kill.

Promises made. Promises kept?

Agreement in principle. With the Taliban. Winning!

And you don't think it's wrong to stay over in perpetuity once we recognize that there is no "winning?"

At no point in this thread have yous stated what you think our goal should be, or at what point you would say "we just can't get it done here"

Trump got stuck with a war started by one President and continued by another, at some point SOMEONE has to get us out of there.

If the Afghan people don't care that their government has made a deal with the Taliban, why should we?

Do you recall from your history courses that the US made a deal which allowed the Emperor of Japan to remain in position in his country ? Sometimes you have to make deals that you don't love to get out of bad situations.

[Kathianne]

And you don't think it's wrong to stay over in perpetuity once we recognize that there is no "winning?"

At no point in this thread have yous stated what you think our goal should be, or at what point you would say "we just can't get it done here"

Trump got stuck with a war started by one President and continued by another, at some point SOMEONE has to get us out of there.

If the Afghan people don't care that their government has made a deal with the Taliban, why should we?

Do you recall from your history courses that the US made a deal which allowed the Emperor of Japan to remain in position in his country ? Sometimes you have to make deals that you don't love to get out of bad situations.

I would never try to compare our history knowledge.

I do think whomever is president has to take things where they lie. Thus, perhaps he should have listened a couple years ago, to attempts to get things back to getting rid/driving down the Taliban, stop with the building government, beyond hardening those already in place. We should have been dealing in the good faith with the government we DID help to establish and then get out.

That's called, Promises kept.

[STTAB]

I would never try to compare our history knowledge.

I do think whomever is president has to take things where they lie. Thus, perhaps he should have listened a couple years ago, to attempts to get things back to getting rid/driving down the Taliban, stop with the building government, beyond hardening those already in place. We should have been dealing in the good faith with the government we DID help to establish and then get out.

That's called, Promises kept.

Sometimes it's not so easy to make chicken salad out of chicken shit. However, I will say this, and I've always said this. don't think Trump REALLY thought he was gonna win in 2016, so he never had a team of HIS people ready to go at key positions and so he's always been relying on advice from people who just frankly have neither his best interest nor the best interest of this country in mind.

The truth is DC is full of fucking warhawks who are getting rich off the perpetual state of war we are in, on BOTH sides of the aisle and if giving the President, Congress and the American people a bunch of fucking lies to protect their war is what they have to do, that's what they will do.

[Kathianne]

A step too far? "They admitted it!"

The US has been 'in talks' with the party, (Taliban) that kills our troops; allows ISIS and al Queda into Afghanistan;and who refuses to work with the Afghan government, elected with US military help.

https://thehill.com/homenews/adminis...ghan-president

Trump cancels secret meeting with Taliban leaders, Afghan president after attack
BY JOHN BOWDEN AND MORGAN CHALFANT - 09/07/19 07:10 PM EDT

SPONSORED: IRAN: THE UNTOLD STORY
TheHill.com
Trump cancels secret meeting with Taliban leaders, Afghan president after attack
BY JOHN BOWDEN AND MORGAN CHALFANT - 09/07/19 07:10 PM EDT 2,648
1,943

President Trump announced Saturday he had canceled a planned secret meeting with leaders of the Taliban and Afghanistan's president at Camp David.


Trump also said he had called off negotiations with the insurgent group after Taliban leadership claimed credit for a deadly attack in Kabul.


In a series of tweets, the president condemned Taliban commanders for an attack in the Afghan capital that killed 11 civilians and a U.S. service member and questioned whether the leaders of the militant group could negotiate a "meaningful" peace agreement.

"Unbeknownst to almost everyone, the major Taliban leaders and, separately, the President of Afghanistan, were going to secretly meet with me at Camp David on Sunday. They were coming to the United States tonight. Unfortunately, in order to build false leverage, they admitted to an attack in Kabul that killed one of our great great soldiers, and 11 other people," Trump tweeted.


"I immediately cancelled the meeting and called off peace negotiations. What kind of people would kill so many in order to seemingly strengthen their bargaining position?" he asked.


"They didn’t, they only made it worse! If they cannot agree to a ceasefire during these very important peace talks, and would even kill 12 innocent people, then they probably don’t have the power to negotiate a meaningful agreement anyway. How many more decades are they willing to fight?" Trump finished.

...

Donald J. Trump

✔

@realDonaldTrump

· 2h

Replying to @realDonaldTrump

....an attack in Kabul that killed one of our great great soldiers, and 11 other people. I immediately cancelled the meeting and called off peace negotiations. What kind of people would kill so many in order to seemingly strengthen their bargaining position? They didn’t, they....

Donald J. Trump

✔

@realDonaldTrump

....only made it worse! If they cannot agree to a ceasefire during these very important peace talks, and would even kill 12 innocent people, then they probably don’t have the power to negotiate a meaningful agreement anyway. How many more decades are they willing to fight?

31K

3:51 PM - Sep 7, 2019

...

The White House has not provided more information about the president’s tweets in response to a request from The Hill. The details surrounding the meeting referenced by Trump were unclear.


The Trump administration has been negotiating for months with Taliban leaders from the group's political office in Doha, Qatar, despite the group's refusal to engage directly with the Afghan government, which it views as a U.S. puppet.


A spokesperson for the militant group took credit for a Monday bombing in Kabul that killed 12 people in an interview with The Associated Press, claiming that it gave the group a stronger bargaining position.


“[W]e understand that peace talks are going on ... but they must also understand that we are not weak and if we enter into talks ... we enter from a strong position,” the spokesperson said.


Five Taliban assailants were reportedly shot and killed by Afghan security forces following the attack.


U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad announced earlier this week that the Trump administration had reached an agreement "in principle" to shutter several bases and withdraw 5,000 troops from the country within about five months in exchange for a peace deal with the Taliban.


Trump campaigned on withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan during 2016 to end America's longest war, but has faced hurdles in fulfilling that promise.


Military leaders have argued for the need or a continued presence in Afghanistan, where the United States currently has roughly 14,000 troops. Trump has also faced pressure from his Republican allies on Capitol Hill, like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who have warned against a full withdrawal from the worn-torn country.

...

[Kathianne]

A Pre-9/11 Mindset Returning?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/...-9-11-mindset/

The Turn Toward a Pre-9/11 Mindset
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
September 7, 2019 6:30 AM

...

What is now happening is a turn to a pre-9/11 security footing. Notice, I said a turn, not a return. It remains to be seen whether, in reality, we have gotten to the point where our threat environment is what it was thought to be before the onslaught; yet, the country has determined to conduct itself as if that were the case.


It’s a bold experiment. I doubt that it will work, though I’d love to be wrong.


Signs of the change were all around us this week, at home and half a world away. In Virginia, a federal judge invalidated the Terrorist Screening Database, a watch list secretly compiled by the government, which subjects those listed to heightened security vetting before they are permitted to board commercial aircraft. In Kabul, the Trump administration’s envoy struck an agreement in principle to reduce the number of American troops in Afghanistan, with an eye toward a withdrawal that would purportedly “end” what the president describes as our “endless” war — U.S. forces having invaded the country in those tense days, 18 years ago.

...

The regrettable legacy of 9/11 and its ambiguous aftermath is the intrusion of the courts into the national-security realm. Judges, whom we insulate from politics, have no constitutional responsibility for national defense. It is supposed to be left to the elected officials accountable to the people whose lives are at stake.


There is wisdom in making national-security decisions political rather than legal. The law strives for rigorous logic, a one-size-fits-all balancing of public-safety concerns against individual rights. Over time, judges reliably expand both the ambit of these rights and the categories of entitled individuals — to include even non-Americans who bear no responsibilities of citizenship, and even enemies who make war on Americans.



...

Intelligence-based security can be effective only if the government can collect and analyze it in secret. Otherwise, we will get scant cooperation from key sources of threat information, from foreign intelligence services to people who’ve been admonished to say something if they see something. Yet we remain error-prone humans acting on imperfect information. A suspicion that a person could be a threat, however reasonable, will necessarily be wrong in some cases. Some innocent people inevitably will be harassed. On the other hand, if suspected people are given notice of, and a meaningful opportunity to challenge, their placement on the list, the list will no longer be secret. And if it is not secret, it will no longer be effective.


It is Congress that is supposed to wrestle with these tough line-drawing exercises. Legislative power is adaptable. It can adjust our precautions as the threat environment changes. It can adopt metrics that increase or decrease screening, while providing for searching oversight. It can ensure that the FBI and other executive security agencies are making decisions based on proper factors, that there are sensible standards for inclusion in the database, and that the inclusion of individual Americans is periodically reevaluated such that they are removed unless there is a good reason for their continued listing.

The executive is responsible for safeguarding the nation, so it will naturally err on the side of heightened security measures. The courts are a bulwark against government abuse, so judges naturally err on the side of individual rights. That’s why Congress is so essential. Lawmakers are supposed to account for these competing interests. But Congress does not do much legislating anymore. It delegates, leaving members more TV time to complain about how bad things are. While many of us are not fans of having judges draw the lines, someone has to do it. When the politically accountable officials duck, courts must fill the void.

...

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the Taliban have greeted the announcement of a near-term U.S. withdrawal not with reciprocal toasts to peace in our time, but with a series of terrorist attacks. The latest (at least as this is written) was on Thursday, killing an American soldier along with a Romanian soldier from our allied forces, as well as eight others.


See, what our government frames as “peace” talks the Taliban are portraying as surrender. They are attacking because they want Afghans to believe they are driving the superpower out in humiliating defeat, just as their mujahideen forebearers drove out the Red Army, hastening the Soviet empire’s collapse.


This week, we learned that former defense secretary James Mattis quit Donald Trump’s administration because, he told the president, he refused to be the Pentagon chief who lost to ISIS in Syria. So far, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has declined to sign off on the “peace” deal negotiated by the administration’s emissary, Zalmay Khalilzad. Obviously, he doesn’t want to be remembered as the foreign-policy chief for an American government that lost to the Taliban.


In the negotiations, the Taliban are insisting that the Trump administration refer to them as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. That was what their regime was called when it imposed sharia governance on the country from 1996 through late 2001. Those were the years when they gave safe harbor to al-Qaeda, which proceeded to execute mass-murder attacks on American diplomatic, military, political, and economic targets. These culminated, 18 years ago, in 9/11.


As this week reminds us, the Taliban still fights shoulder-to-shoulder with al-Qaeda to kill Americans. When our troops vacate Afghanistan, the Islamic Emirate will be reestablished, the U.S.-backed government will be dismantled, Afghans who allied with the United States will be purged, and al-Qaeda will set up shop again. It will enjoy a status similar to that of Hezbollah in Lebanon: a quasi-government armed force whose main focus is the global jihad.


Its main target is still America.


In 2019, you can declare you’re in a pre-9/11 world. Just like you can declare a war is over because you got tired of fighting. Just like you can declare the aviation precautions are overkill because you’d like them to be. Doesn’t make it so.

[Kathianne]

No one else finds it strange that the White House had plans to honor the Taliban at Camp David? 3 days before the 17 years after 9/11?

[LongTermGuy]

No one else finds it strange that the White House had plans to honor the Taliban at Camp David? 3 days before the 17 years after 9/11?

"Honor" ???....your watching to much CNN......Your comment is strange...