What took Karzai so long to figure this out. (Rhetorical Q)

I would be interested in a follow up poll targeting the 30% who support the war. What reasons would they give? Quagmires are good for the MIC economy and Karzai can be eliminated if he doesn’t agree with the MIC’s decision making.

No, it’s the other way around. Karzai is in effect accusing the Taliban of giving the Americans a reason to stay longer by attacking. He’s also trying to create distance between himself and the Americans so he won’t be seen as a puppet. He’s trying to position himself for survival after the Americans leave; I think he has a slightly better shot than the South Vietnamese regime did, but not much better. But his best shot is probably an appeal to nationalism: paint the Taliban as Pakistani tools, oppose the Americans where possible, and pretend that only Karzai has Afghan interests at heart.

… and Americans should get out of Afghanistan as soon as possible, attacking Karzai verbally as they go (if they want him to stay in power, the American government should act like Karzai is uncooperative, too independent, too protective of the Afghans, etc).

fatster on her roundup yesterday evening gave a link to a Guardian article by Emma Graham-Harrison, which describes the US decision to cancel the transfer of Bahgrab prison. The article concludes as follows:

“Saturday’s cancellation of the prisoner transfer came after Karzai told the opening of parliament that some of the men held by US forces were innocent and he would free them when they had been handed over.

US officials have said they have detained some prisoners based on classified intelligence they cannot share, but do not hold anyone without cause.”

My bolds.

What’s hilarious is that that actually has been precisely US policy. The US government has been funding Islamist rebels/mujahideen/whatever longer than I’ve been alive.

Where do people think the Taliban originated two decades ago?

Death is just the price we pay for a bloated military-industrial complex.

Earth to Karzai: No shit, Sherlock. What took ya so long.

Albeit, I also agree with JoeBuck @3. Karzai is engaging in a very real life or death Kabuki Show. So good luck with that, I guess.

We need to start having two label to describe the U.S.A. There are American Interests and American Corporate Interests. Until the Corporatocracy is driven out of power polls are meaningless unless they are only polling the 1%.

I think the “origin” of AQ & groups of its ilk was the State Dept terrorist lists that started in 1965. Prolly the idea goes deeper into U.S. history than that, but that is a stage of formulazation of it. Terrorists don’t have to be Islamic to be useful, but given centrality of USG wars in resource rich countries, esp ME, it helps if USG can make Islam the enemy.

Terrorists are a super resource for the U.S. USG can change them from friends (cannon fodder in secret wars) to enemies with the flip of a switch (too many examples to need to document) as “needs” require, can burn them without conscience when they are not useful either as tools on one side or the other.

Nothing seems to create fear better than by shouting terrorist, it would seem, though dogs kill & maim more people in a year than terrorists, yet humans don’t respond in quite the same way by USG shouting dog.

Fair enough…I’d date it, then, to the creation of Afghanistan as kind of a testing ground between the Brits and Russians. In the Scheme of Things, it’s actually the Europeans that have caused more problem than the Americans…although we seem to be trying very hard to make their problems our problems.

What? USA making enemies out of former allies or is it vice-verda???

Isn’t that pretty much SOP???

Ooooh, oooooh! I know, I saw the movie. Call on me.

“We did not collaborate with those terrorists, the Taliban.”

And really, any answer will do. What’s important is that you have good self-esteem and do whatever the Principal tells you to do.

You’ve got the standard story down pat.

I’m peeling back the layers of the onion, courtesy of a William Blum book signing I went to a week ago. Blum worked for the State dept in the mid-1960s as a computer programmer, got canned or self-canned owing to anti-VN war, became journalist & chronicler of USG military interventions since WWII–over 50 of them. Most of those have been attributed to CIA ops, classic one being overthrow of Mossedegh in 1953.

After attending that signing, I got thinking about how having a list of operatives the USG could call on to do its dirty work would extend much farther back than the Afghan one we all know about.

The Dulles bros were particularly scurrilous characters in the 1950s. I wonder who they called upon to act behind the scenes. The State Dept didn’t have a formal list back then, but I’d guess the Dulleses had contacts…

Why would the Taliban want to keep is there after 2014? I thought the Bush theory was always don’t tell them when we are leaving or they will just lay low until we are gone. Seems backwards. They want us around to bomb them some more with drones?

Hmm, maybe then we can re invade them again. Or get more foreign aid or some such.

Show off!

Tribal rivalry suggests Taliban could be tagging their enemies as targets.

USG has no idea who it is killing.

Taliban’s interests? War lordism. As long as there is instability in Afghanistan, pieces can be carved off for local power.

Might be other advantages but those are what I can think of now.

Sounds like the proper kabuki all around. Whether the US and the Taliban are even talking is somewhat immaterial to the plot. Karzai definitely has to push his Pashtun background and distance himself from the US to survive in order to peel away the non-Taliban factions in the Taliban coalition whose sole motive is the eviction of US troops. He also has to deal with the Northern Alliance factions either by marginalizing them or forming a coalition with them. His actions follow that path.

The Taliban is obligated for its credibility to deny that it is negotiating with the US.

The US is trying to get out, have some remaining presence, and immunize US and NATO personnel against being held to account for war crimes. Of course it is not going to turn over a prison containing people who will provide evidence of war crimes. And of course it will deny negotiating with “terrorists” separately from the Karzai government even if it is.

This rift is quite an optimistic sign.

Seems like they can have all those things if we just move on. That country is never going to be stable, hasn’t been for a thousand years. Not likely to happen now. It is hard to wrap my mind around the idea the Taliban want to get in bed with us. That would seem to be the absolute last thing they want. Karzai seems a little unbalanced to me. I suspect he is the guy wants us to hang around to keep him rolling in silk.

Yeah, don’t want to threadjack this too much, but it is interesting ‘peeling back the layers’. At some point you have to just make a decision about what are the proximate causes and what are the earlier ones (I mean, human evolution? the birth of the solar system? the universe?) – or else, you deny all agency to current actors, and I’m just not that fatalistic (or, some might say, hopelessly naive). Obama doesn’t have to submit a mil/intel/sec budget as large as he has; at some level, he is choosing to do so. He doesn’t have to prevent prosecutions of war criminals and financial fraudsters. Etc. There are countervailing forces, even at this late stage, for a basic Liberal system of limited governance and rule of law.

Anyway, perhaps the American story really begins when we ran out of room to conquer westwards, and already kicked the Europeans out of the south, so we had to look East :) Our model of a United States of America, being superior to the divided states of Europe, naturally rushed in to fill the void of Civilized Leadership and Resource Exploitation.

Optimistic eh? Then carry on by all means.

we had to look East

Just read War Lovers, leading role of TR, NE poohbahs like Cabot Lodge, Hearst, minor role played by McKinley.

The reason for peeling back the layers in this particular thread is to expose what a friend intelligently calls the false dichotomy. By our arguing about whether Taliban are friends or enemies, or Karzai is friend or enemy, or Pakistan is friend or enemy, the real evil of USG is kept hidden.

Looking at general pattern & long history helps to expose that.

I agree, perhaps we should start to teach history to the general public? /s

Thanks for the laugh.

Come on they even made a movie about it.

Right. Smash up the place then leave flinging snotty remarks over our shoulders about ungrateful natives. We trashed Afghanistan and now we don’t want to be there.

Not generally, but on the fact that the US is leaving Afghanistan through a negotiated SOFA or by getting kicked out. Who does the US replace Karzai with?

Whatever happened, the story has to be that the US won. That’s because the Dolchstoßlegende crowd are just waiting to pounce. Then we’ll hear no end of “Afghanistan syndrome” as an excuse to dismiss critics of a new war.

I’m more fascinated by movies & TV shows made in advance, as precursors, like 24 for torture, to get public used to the idea before they reveal the real thing. CWW was old hat by the time it came out.

I’m shocked.

Then again, I was shocked to learn that gambling went on in Rick’s Casino.