The president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, is responding to the latest Taliban attack, a suicide bomb which killed 30 Afghans, by inviting the Taliban to form the government with him.
Apparently, he's just plain sick and tired of all the fighting. "If I find their address, there is no need for them to come to me, I'll personally go there and get in touch with them," the Star quotes him as saying. "If a group of Taliban or a number of Taliban come to me and say, 'President, we want a department in this or in that ministry or we want a position as deputy minister ... and we don't want to fight any more' ... If there will be a demand and a request like that to me, I will accept it because I want conflicts and fighting to end in Afghanistan."
So do we all, Mr. President. But please allow me to suggest an alternate plan of action if you do happen to get Mullah Omar's address.
I'm confused by your "alternate plan". Are you encouraging the Afghan president to blow up the Taliban? I wouldn't expect you to be one to encourage war.
ReplyDelete??
I would never dare to encourage an unnecessary war. I do, however, absolutely endorse a complete finishing of a necessary war.
ReplyDeleteIt could be that Mullah Omar et al will be completely willing to share power with a group demonstrably less radical, but I seriously doubt this, based on their past.
This is the same Mullah who dared President Bush to meet him in the desert with an AK-47. He doesn't strike me as the kind of man whom we can trust to be civilized.
This is a different type of enemy than we faced in the World Wars. They haven't signed the Geneva Convention, they torture and execute their POWs on satellite TV, and they don't hesitate to hide in schools and hospitals to engineer maximum media criticism of military action taken against them. We must be as ruthless with them on the battlefield as they would be with us.
As David Warren said, "When there is a war to fight, and no alternative to fighting it, you bet I am a war-monger. The sooner we have destroyed the enemy, the sooner we can get back to sucking our thumbs."