Frist - Cut and Run From Afghanistan

Senator Frist wants to let the Taliban back into the Afghanistan government. I cannot believe what I just wrote. This is such hypocritical bullshit. He says they cannot be defeated. A political solution is the only answer he says. Which may be true, however a political solution that includes the Taliban is not. The Taliban are fanatics, they are extremists and they are as close to AL-QAEDA as anybody on the planet. They fought to the death to save Bin-Laden. Obviously Afghanistan is a failure, a failure of Bush policy. He DID NOT finish the job. The Taliban should have been CRUSHED. Bin-Laden killed or captured. Afghanistan supported and secured BEFORE we ever looked at IRAQ. No plan for post war Iraq and no plan for post war Afghanistan. Now we have two “fiascos”. The Newsweek covers got a lot of attention last week for not putting the “Losing Afghanistan” story on the U.S. cover. However, the story itself was much more important. I suggest you read it. From Newsweek: Some critics point to a jarring mismatch between Bush's rhetoric and the scant attention paid to Afghanistan. Jim Dobbins, Bush's former special envoy to Kabul—he also led the Clinton administration's rebuilding efforts in Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti and Somalia—calls Afghanistan the "most under-resourced nation-building effort in history." Former Bush reconstruction coordinator Carlos Pascual, who retired in December 2005, does not dispute this assessment. He says the State Department has "maybe 20 to 30 percent" of the people it needs. Even Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, fretted last week that for five years the administration and Congress have failed to create a powerful nation-building czar, despite their enthusiasm for regime change. "We have a long way to go," he said. The dangers of allowing Afghanistan to become a jihadist haven again are too many to count. It's not merely that bin Laden and Zawahiri may now die peacefully in their beds, safe among Pashtun tribesmen, as a senior U.S. military official conceded to NEWSWEEK last week, speaking anonymously because he was discussing classified operations. (A French intelligence report leaked over the weekend suggested bin Laden had done just that in August, dying quietly of typhus, but like many such rumors in the past it could not be confirmed.) Nor is the problem simply that the increasingly confident Taliban is launching ever more brazen attacks—in recent weeks, bombing a convoy scarcely a block from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and assassinating a major provincial governor. No: it's that Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups now have a place from which to hatch the next 9/11. "This standoff could go on for 40 or 50 years," says a retired U.S. general who served in Afghanistan, speaking only on condition of anonymity. "It's not going to be a takeover by the Taliban as long as NATO is there. Instead this is going to be like the triborder region of South America, or like Kashmir, a long, drawn-out stalemate where everyone carves out spheres of influence." Eikenberry disagrees, though he refused to put a time frame on Afghanistan's recovery. "It won't be decades," he says. The Taliban doesn't always share Al Qaeda's goals or tactics, although some units have taken up suicide bombing. But a guerrilla calling himself Commander Hemat, a former anti-Soviet mujahedin fighter who now works closely with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, says foreign Arabs are being welcomed again. "Now the money is flowing again because the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan are producing results," he told NEWSWEEK. Zabibullah, a Taliban operative who has proved reliable in the past, says the Qaeda operatives "feel more secure and can concentrate on their own business other than just surviving."