Taliban: The Sequel

Can't say for sure this piece is 100% correct, but it sure suggests some interesting questions. Such as, would the U.S. sell out the Karzai government in exchange for control over Pakistan's nuclear program? It also reminds us that Karzai's useful shelf-life to the Bush White House would expire with Karzai's re-election in October 2004.

Comments

[Dan]

would the U.S. sell out the Karzai government in exchange for control over Pakistan's nuclear program

Well, given a choice between "Pakistan's fundamentalists get their hands on nukes" and "Afghanistan's government collapses again", I'd pick the latter in a heartbeat. We can always re-invade if the Taliban sets up shop again, but there isn't much we can do once the nuclear cat is out of the bag.

By the way, I'm kind of in awe of the stupidity of the following statement (from the linked article): "In the 1980s, the United States spent billions of dollars to get Afghanistan out of the Russian orbit. It is ridiculous to believe that the Bush administration would act differently now..." As if there was no difference between current-day Russia and the Soviet Union of the 1980s? Imagine how stupid a writer would have sounded, in 1963, writing "in the 1940s we sent billions of dollars of aid to the USSR; it is ridiculous to think that our government would act against Soviet interests now".

[JDM]

I'm not sure why, in the writer's view, Pakistan is so much preferrable to Washington than Russia, or Iran for that matter. Why hand al-Queda's old spawning grounds to a government already tipping further toward islamo-fascism? Especially when Pakistan was complicit in the Taliban's takeover in the first place.

[Kevin Carson]

According to a lot of material gathered by Dana Rohrbacher in the late '90s, Pakistan was acting as a proxy for the U.S. in installing the Taliban. The State Department negotiated a deal between the contending militias to mutually disarm them; then Pakistan, acting on behalf of the U.S., resupplied the Taliban with arms. The result was a unified government that controlled most of the national territory.

The Taliban, like a lot of other enemies of the week, were clients who turned against their former patrons or ceased to be useful.

If the U.S. government were supplying arms and advisers to Satan today, and he stopped taking orders from Washington, I'm guessing the White House press secretary would be in front of a podium tomorrow talking about all the horrible things they'd just discovered in Hell, and the crying need for regime change. And then next week, a photo would surface of Rumsfeld shaking hands with the Devil in 1983.

[dc]

Mr. Maitra's summary of the Telegraph article is pretty silly. "...the Taliban have seized whole swathes of the country"? See if you can spot that in http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2003%2F07%2F21%2Fwafg21.xml

[Dan]

Oh, an invasion here, an invasion there. Just another day at the office.

I momentarily forgot that the hip "libertarian" attitude these days is to stare impotently at people who want you dead. And possibly write a snotty article about how at least you'll die with your property rights intact, or something.

I said "if the Taliban sets up shop again". This leaves two options -- one, that you would rather leave them in power in Afghanistan in the event that they take it over again, or two, that you prefer "clever" remarks to thinking. The best we can currently hope for is that a US-friendly dictator stays in charge of Pakistan, and Afghanistan remains Taliban-free. The second-best option is that the Taliban take over Afghanistan again, because we can (as demonstrated) remove them later if we need to. Letting Taliban sympathizers take over Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation, would obviously be the worst option. It isn't as if we can un-nuke Manhattan once it happens.

[fyodor]

Re Dan,

Oh, an invasion here, an invasion there. Just another day at the office....

[Anonymous]

" enemies of the week" who happend to back the dudes who murdered 3000 innocents

if the US sold the devil a pitchfork, apperently Kevin would sit and do nothing when the devil stabbed his little sister mulitple times.

[Barba Richard]

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DATE: 01/20/2004 10:16:17
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