"I'm heartened by the words of this senior military commander ..."Good news for the Taliban is good news for Jack. That really ought to boost troop morale.
Detailed analysis at The Torch where the bottom line is:
The one thing Brigadier Carleton-Smith did not say was that the Taliban would win. But that is certainly not the impression most readers would get from those headlines, which seem to say the glass is plain empty--if not entirely broken. Most people think if you don't win, you lose. I really do think the Western media are increasingly taking sides: the wrong one. Fie on them.
2 comments:
Unfortunately, I think the Brit General is right, we can't win this. But I think the reason for this situation is that our supposed "ally", Pakistan, is harboring and perhaps even aiding the Taliban. We cannot win as long as the bad guys have a safe refuge to rest and rearm. NATO itself is also helping the Taliban because of restrictions placed on many of the troops so they do not come under fire and actually have to hurt the bad guys. This is mainly due to leftist governments with Laytonesque heads of state like who would rather not be there but feel obligated to maintain appearances to NATO. This leaves all the heavy hitting to a few countries. Needless to say, the Taliban are under no such restrictions. So, we will lose but it will be because there is no will in our Starbucks Society to grapple with the bad guys in a fashion that will get the job done. Our forefathers in WW1, WW2 and Korea would be ashamed at what we've become.
I don't think there's anything especially new in what the Brit commander said. In fact he's reiterating what many reasonable people have known for a long time. The Taliban, at least the non-head-hacking component, will eventually be accomodated politically in any stable system of governance. That's what the Afghan leadership itself has said for a long time now. The problem of course is to achieve a stable political situation which includes building an Afghan national military capable of resisting a violent insurgency on it's own. When that comes about the war will effectively have been "won". NATO's pulling out before achieving stability would be a defeat. Though I agree with you about NATO's weakness to date, I doubt NATO will give up the fight any time soon - contrary to the defeatist messages being spun in the media and by the likes of Taliban Jack Layton. And I don't believe the Brit commander would like Layton's interpretation of his assessment or being associated with Layton's repugnantly gleeful defeatism.
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