Taliban prisoners to be freed
 

Afghanistan to release scores of Taliban prisoners
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-25673011

Karzai refuses to sign a security deal first and now this. What a sad state of affairs and an affront to the US military and taxpayers. Let's not wait and get hell out of that hell hole.

Interesting link on our war expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
http://nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/

Can't we shoot Karzai before we go?

If we leave, we won't have to.

Pete

That was a want to, not a have to.

And I know it's wrong. Oh yes.

LOL! You bad, bad leftie :D

Pete

And to think that a-hole actually lived here for a while.

This is all about Karzai doing what he thinks he needs to do to maintain power. Politicians are the same the world around.

Not to be contrary but just how long do we expect Karzai's Justice dept. to hold Afghanis without charges in their own country? If Afghanistan wants to at least appear a responsible state? It would behoove them to follow international norms of justice. They will ultimately have to deal with the Taliban on some sort of political footing.
I mean, who do they think they are? The United States?
Mebbe we should sublease them some space on a certain Caribbean island...:rolleyes:

Just how does one deal with a group of fanatics who think nothing of attempting the assasination of a teen aged girl?

Drones?

Ignore them and let them do whatever the hell they want in their sandbox. I think we've conclusively proven that we can't kill them all. Trying to do so actually contributes to the creation of more of them.

Ding! ding! ding!


We have a winner...

At least it is now evident what any of us who had read history KNEW when the invasion of Afghanistan began: that it was a totally useless and futile gesture. As soon as the US pulled out, things would go right back to how it was before. The US was ALWAYS going to lose that war. I was going to say Osama was brilliant, but that's giving him too much credit. He was a savvy guy who understood how the world works. Especially how the US right was wired. Years in the grave now, and he is still winning.

Indeed. We should have just bombed the piss out of them as punishment for 9/11 and left it at that. It would have sent a message to any other potential perps and would have left Afghanistan in exactly the same shape as it is now.

Yup. Drop anything they had on any Taliban or al Qaeda base, on sept 12. And keep doing it until they ran out of bombs, missiles, etc. Likely would have gotten a few of them at a much lower cost.

Yes but wouldn't this just help create even more terrorists? Didn't Finn point this out a few posts ago?:confused:

No argument to both ideas and I'm a bleeding heart liberal. Boots on the ground has pushed the crazies into Pakistan and destabilized a country with nukes making the situation by far more dangerous. With worldwide shipping becoming containerized, I'm a little surprised that there hasn't been a terrorist attack shipped into a port in the west already.

If General Tommy Franks had not tried to run the damn show from Florida we might have gotten Bin Laden at Tora Bora and that would have been the end of it. Rummie's remodelling of the army was a royal FUBAR.

Even earlier had they launched the cruise missiles when Bill wanted them to we might have got him even earlier.

What, blow up a deserted camp or two, maybe a babyfood factory?

Yep. The sad reality is we needed to do more than aim some cruise missles. Killing terrorists is what we have to do.

Pete

Unfortunately, these efforts were just as effective, but much less expensive than Dubya's follies. Hell, we killed Osama and Al Qaeda hasn't really skipped a bit - pretty much a Whack-a-Mole thing goin' on.

I really, really enjoy saying this: What did Sandy Burgle?

Pete

;)I'll be your huckleberry. So, what did Sandy Burgle?

Killing terrorists doesn't work. You just keep creating more of them. Al Qaeda never amounted to more then a couple of hundred guys. Yet after thousands of American casualties, it still goes keeps going on. Particularly easy to create terrorists when you have foreign invaders in your country.

So, what, send them flowers?

Pete

Precisely.

So, our efforts should not be to kill them, it should be to marginalize them.

Step One? Fuck their piss ant country. No invasion(s), no deployments. We just keep them out of ours and let them wither where they are until Natural Selection breeds them out.

Basically, we do WWII island hoping with a bit of Manifest Destiny reservation-style isolationism thrown in.

It's worked more than once.

Thing I can't figure is if they hate us infidels so bloody much why are there so many of them over here?

Muslims don't hate us so bloody much. Radical Islamists do. I'd wager that there is more anti-Muslim sentiment here in the US than there is anti-US sentiment in most Muslim lands. In fact, many Muslim lands actually like and admire the US, though they may disagree with some of our policies. In my travels in Turkey, Morocco and Jordan, I've never experienced any anti-Americanism whatsoever.

You know, folks who don't like black people ask similar loaded questions about them.

Everyone thinks their own attitudes towards particular groups are justified and reasonable.

There does appear to be a dark undercurrent in the Islamic world.

Pete

Unfortunately, there are dark undercurrents all over the world. They become all the worse with a religious overlay.