Saturday, March 07, 2009
What do George W. Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have in common?
No, not millenialism. The shoe thing! More here.
1 Comments:
By 
Escort81, at
Sat Mar 07, 11:13:00 PM:
OK, O/T, but I just saw this article posted and have to quote the lede:
"President Barack Obama says he hopes U.S. troops can identify moderate elements of the Taliban and move them toward reconciliation."
It's just one of those ledes that you read and say, "Huh?"
In fairness, after reading the entire article, it does not sound as strange as it does at first glance. Of course we want to convince militant opponents to put down their arms and work out a peace agreement on terms that we believe will be positive for the future of the country.
I would submit that people who are "moderate Taliban" are not truly Taliban. Everything I have ever read about their origins and their ideology (Looming Tower, Ghost Wars, etc.) tells me that "moderate Taliban" makes about as much sense as "moderate Gestapo" or "moderate SS." The recently popularized Valkyrie plot perhaps tells us that even within a horrific institution there can be those few individuals who recognize that it must be overthrown from within, or at least its leader taken out (thereby demonstrating that a truly evil ideology is not full of uniformly evil people; also,the prominent plotters were German aristocrats who were sick of the Nazis), but the Taliban do not have the same relationship with the seldom heard from Mullah Omar as the Germans did with their Fuhrer.
The funny thing is, I agree with President Obama in his emphasis on bringing more resources to bear in Afghanistan. I wish he would be less like W in articulating (or not) how this will happen.
How about just "we need to defeat the Taliban and its leadership where they live and hide, and then reach out to moderate elements of other Afghan militant groups."
