The United States and some other allied countries (who have forces in Afghanistan) have been battling the Taliban for many years now, and they are not winning the battle. The Taliban get a lot of support among the embittered people of Afghanistan who have seen only years of fighting, who are conservative by themselves, who see a corrupt Government that provides zero development and supports the warlords; and in addition, the Taliban have a base in the neighboring country Pakistan where they can regroup, get the required rest and sanctuary (even though the US has drones forever attacking from the sky and killing the Taliban and Al-Qaeda where they can find them).
For many years now, the US has recognized that there can be negotiation with the Taliban since the Taliban has the aim of wresting control of Afghanistan and then would be back to its tactics of promoting its stringent code of Islam, its promotion of the practice of developing Islamic warriors; however, now that the US is becoming war-weary of the Afghanistan conflict, it seems to be silently supporting defining some sections of the Taliban as people who can be negotiated with and who can be made part of a solution to the problem in Afghanistan.
This is a tough call, since for the sake of ending the war, the US looks to be giving up the war; and this is not a fight against some rational but different ideology, this is a fight for the future. If the US, in any way, seems to be losing the war to the Taliban and gives up, it will show up in a wide-spread resurgence of Islamic fervor throughout countries in the whole region, and demonstrate to them that they are on the winning track.
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In any war against terrorism, it is not only the military who takes action. It is the intelligence agencies who play a profound role in this war, whether this be civilian agencies such as the CIA, or military intelligence. These agencies have access to huge amount of funds, have access to the latest of technology, and are also responsible for direct action (which could be action in the form of disinformation campaigns or gathering information, or could be targeted action such as assassination or the use of drones for killing terrorists who otherwise could not be attacked). Imagine a huge wild area where you cannot send your agents, but where you know that terrorists are staying and constantly plotting to do harm. And you can see them through powerful cameras on drone surveillance planes that constantly fly overhead and from which you cannot hide so easily. Continue reading The Jordanian bomber who destroyed a CIA forward operating base in Afghanistan The conflict in Iran between the moderates and the conservatives has been ongoing for some time now. However, it really flared up after the June elections, when there was a dispute and the incumbent, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was granted a victory over main opposition candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi. The conservatives have used all the weapons at their disposal – they have used the religious power of Supreme Leader Khameini who threatened the protesters with stern action, they used the Revolutionary Guards and the Basiji militia to severely crack down on the protesters, many of those arrested were tortured and many died under torture (the torture grew so much that the Supreme Leader had to order the closing of one particularly reviled detention center), and yet the protests continue. Afghanistan is a country which has a long history of not giving an easy time to foreign armies. From the time of the British who spent many battles in there, but could never claim that they had an easy control, to the Soviets who spent a huge military effort over there but finally had to retreat in the face of a harsh and determined, religion-fired insurgency, to the Pakistanis who used proxies (Taliban) to control the country, but could never claim that Pakistan ran Afghanistan. The history of the US in terms of running military campaigns in foreign countries after the Second World War has been bad; they had to retreat from Vietnam, retreated from Beirut after a huge truck bomb killed many marines, the Iraq war had seen a huge amount of internal opposition, a balanced Somalia effort was stopped after a street fight in Mogadishu killed 18 US soldiers, and so on. There is a huge internal debate in the US about evaluating the needs of sending troops to battle overseas, even if there is a need; and the sight of body bags of fallen soldiers causes this debate to get even more heated and emotional. Continue reading Having to defend the decision of announcing the withdrawal from Afghanistan |
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