Taliban issues congratulations to its forces on 'defeat' of Canadians

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It's here:

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/taliban-issues ... 46055.html

The Canadians did an excellent job in their efforts to keep the Taliban extremist from doing their worst, as far these weirdo claiming victory we wish them many such victories.

As in Many times we need to say "Thank You Canada". They stand with us often and we don't acknowledge it often enough.

Whatever. Enjoy your cave.

They'll be coming out of their caves soon enough when all of ISAF leaves and the Afghan govt collapses. Just a waste of lives and money to try nation building in Astan. We should have left as soon as Bush decided OBL was no longer as important as playing silly buggers in Iraq. I guess if someone fought over there they want to believe it was worth it, but time will most likely tell it wasn't.

Set aside the pronouncements from the Taliban mouthpieces though and it's hard to argue that they didn't prevail in the end. Karzai's kleptocracy has been negotiating with them for years now and the Afghan government is so unreliable as an ally that they make Pakistan look as loyal as the Sacred Banders in comparison. The Taliban victory was more or less assured years ago when the sensible mission of destroying Al Qaeda got mission-creeped into the nonsense of building a democracy in a place where the very concept is so alien to the locals that it might as well have come from Mars.

Afghanistan wasn't as bad as Vietnam was. The end result is the same though. Won all the battles but still managed to lose the overall war, thanks almost entirely to the think-tanks in DC that had the Bush Admin under their spell imposing a fantasy-land foreign affairs policy onto the US government. And American lives are being lost over there because of the simple fact that any sort of retreat or comprehensive withdrawal in this era automatically equals a complete existential domestic political defeat. Fuck it, when it's all done and written down the only real win in Afghanistan will be from the soldiers who kept rescuing stray dogs and brought them home with them instead of leaving them behind to end up on someone's dinner plate.

To paraphrase the old genius, never were the lives of so many wasted thanks to the rotten and delusional thinking of such a wretched few.

The opposition was derided for wanting to cut and run. In the end that's what we did anyway, just after losing more lives, crippling more people and spending more money. The West just doesn't have the kind of staying power that would be required to civilize Astan by force (sort of an oxymoron), and even then you'd have to also civilize Pstan and probably Iran.

The sheer power of post-9/11 rage, of which I admit to being guilty of myself for too long a time after the attack on the WTC, shut off the critical thinking abilities of too many. If those as brutal as the Soviets were, who did things in Afghanistan to quell the populace that rivalled what the Third Reich did on the Eastern Front, couldn't hold onto that fucking place then no one can. Rabid primitive scum that they apparently are, tribal Muslims deserve some kind of credit when they hunker down to defend their turf. They have an immunity to the nonsense of "shock & awe" that's beyond belief and a mental staying power so strong it's like their minds are composed of 99% Viagra.

Astan Muslims anyway.

I was all for us joining NATO (wasn't it?) after 9/11 to go after Bin Laden. agreed 100%. But I didn't buy the bullshit that led to Iraq (although hearing Blair argue for it almost sucked me in. Amazing how much an intelligent sounding accent can make bullshit seem reasonable) and realized Astan was turning into bullshit as well. And our reasons for staying were to get cred from our allies - is that worth sacrificing lives for?

We probably should have allowed the warlords to just carve up Astan after we gave up on OBL, maybe they could have stopped the Taliban. Or at least put up a good fight and kept the Taliban busy for a long time.

That's kind of true, but the reality for the Soviets was the same for us - the insurgents had a bolthole on the other line of a dotted line neither was willing to cross to stamp them out.

Every time the Taliban got crushed in Afghanistan, they slid into Pakistan and rearmed and recruited (with the help of allies in the ISI) until they felt ready to go back and try again. Had either party (the Soviets or the West) been willing to fly over the border and smash their camps and bases in Pakistan, the Taliban would have been thoroughly and decisively stamped out.

But in the 80s, Pakistan was an ally of the US and now they have nukes, so the West wasn't willing to risk it either.

It was lose-lose no matter how you slice it. The best we can hope for is that Karzai's regime can hold onto power after NATO leaves - and if it is in danger of falling, that the West will intervene to prevent it (unlike the fall of South Vietnam in 1975).

At some point a corrupt regime is going to collapse no matter what we do to intervene. And it's not as if we can just bomb the shit out of the country. It would mean raising troops again, fighting an enemy that just melts away and has learned not to mass their forces. If your doctrine held sway, we might as well just station troops there permanently. I don't know if the US has the capability never mind the will to do that.

All we can do is allow the place to fester, and if the Taliban start acting outside their country lance that boil once in a while. Before we intervened, they had no interest in doing so. Not sure what their state of mind is now.

Reminds me of Monty Python. Come back here.....it's just a flesh wound.

For them it is, or more accurately they'll be able to grow their limbs back right quick. It's like trying to kill a starfish by cutting it up.

sweet lucidity.

roflmao!!!!

thanks for posting soon enough for me to not go on a rampage so early in my weekend.

Every one is predicting the fall of the government to the Taliban, but it hasn't happened yet. I can see them reasserting themselves in the south--their tradiational territories, but the rest of the country never wanted the Taliban to start with. International aid will keep the defence forces paycheques coming for a few years. Maybe some of the postive influences of occupation--decvelopment of infrastructure and education for girls--will have taken seed in that rocky soil that is Afghanistan.