Jay: There are Pashtuns and there are Taliban. My impression is that only a fraction of the former are the latter. Since Taliban gave al quaeda a home from which to murder several thousand Americans, and were/are collaborating if not sponsoring al quaeda in its ongoing efforts at mass murder of civilians, the U.S. should do whatever it takes to crush the Taliban. It appears whatever we've been doing hasn't been working. I don't know why, but both Afghanistan's history and religion, and our recent Iraq experience, suggests Afghans' aversion to resident foreign troops is an insuperable barrier to acceptance and success for any gov't we so bluntly sponsor.
The U.S., to have any hope of neutralizing Taliban and similar terrorists, must be resolute, clever, and absolutely ruthless in dealing with them. Ideally that means letting them separate themselves from the non-terrorist populace, the better to identify and kill them. Perversely, this may best be accomplished if they come into power after we leave!
Continued Afghan success at ousting invaders assumes, given today's weapons, a civilized approach to dealing with the Afghans. At some point, facing the threat or fact of more mass slaughter of U.S. civilians by Taliban-sponsored terrorists, an American president will worry more about intended primary damage on our shores and much less about collateral damage in terror-sponsoring nations. He will switch doctrine and just do what it takes to eliminate a threat coming from a blatant terror-sponsor, such as Afghanistan was (and may again become).
Muslims only think they have it bad now in Guantanamo and various foreign soil prisons. Another attack or two in the U.S. and civilian innocents in the sponsoring Muslim nation will be victims on a scale that makes our style of war in Iraq look restrained. Pushed far enough, the U.S. will adopt a Russian level of ruthlessness, using American weapons.
The greater the Taliban resurgence to come, and the fewer the U.S. troops in country when it comes, the greater the clustering of high-value targets and the easier a solution to Taliban resurgence will be. Sadly, that will mean perpetrating our own atrocities because "collateral" deaths from U.S. attacks will likely far exceed terrorists' victims in the U.S. There is no surgical way of removing the Islamofacist cancer before it keeps metasticizing across the ocean.
We could have avoided feeding it with U.S. troops stationed in and invading Muslim nations (before any attacked us)--and maybe we still could avoid feeding it. I doubt it; I only see a president who can't bring himself to admit he was wrong to invade the only nation among the big 3 in the area that wasn't sponsoring terrorists against the U.S. Then I see an "opposition" party that to a large extent joined in the warmongering, and even today has key members defending the Iraq invasion and ongoing occupation.
Bad as the Federal Reserve is, I think the military/terror outlook makes an even stronger case for gold. |
