"WE can always count on the Americans to do the right thing," Winston Churchill is reputed to have said, "after they have exhausted all the other possibilities."
I love that line! Good ol' Winnie sure came up with some good ones!
In announcing last week that it was to talk direct to the Taliban, the US was doing the right thing - but at least 10 years too late.
The White House statement about the US-Taliban talks in Qatar came on the day that NATO celebrated the transfer to Afghan security forces of control of the remaining 95 districts of the country in which Western forces had been in the lead. Both events are milestones in the US's recessional from its longest war - a war that is likely to have cost US taxpayer more than $US800 billion ($869bn).
Originally, in the wake of September 11, the US and its allies went into Afghanistan to deal with al-Qa'ida, the Arab terrorists who had been given sanctuary by the conservative religious zealots - the Taliban - who then ruled the country. US and British special forces and intelligence officers encouraged the Persian-speaking warlords of northern Afghanistan to eject the mainly Pashtun Taliban from power, expelling them first from Kabul and then from Kandahar, their home city in the south.
Many wrongly supposed that the Taliban had been defeated. But in reality they had done what parties to a civil war usually do when faced with overwhelming force. They pulled back to fight on another day and in another way, into the south and east of Afghanistan and, most important, back across the Durand line (the porous border that separates Afghanistan and Pakistan) into the lawless Pashtun tribal areas of Pakistan. By January 2002 al-Qa'ida had, in effect, been removed from Afghanistan. But across the next decade, the tide of Taliban influence has returned, until today it laps at the suburbs of Kabul.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/talking-with-the-taliban/story-fnb64oi6-1226669003748
