The Most Unethical Act: Losing a War

Jonathan S. Tobin Web Exclusive

Monday, PBS’s American Experience series broadcast a documentary titled The Bombing of Germany, about the strategic-bombing campaign carried out against the Nazis by American forces in World War II. Coming from the liberal-leaning PBS and in an era where denunciations of American military actions — even in the “good war” against Nazi Germany — have become commonplace, it would have been no surprise if the film had proved to be yet another revisionist attempt to decry Allied tactics as immoral. This impression is reinforced by the introduction to the film on PBS’s website, which highlights the number of German civilian casualties incurred by Allied bombing and the “defining moments that led the U.S. across a moral divide” that would make it easier to drop a nuclear bomb on Japan. Indeed, the narration heard during the opening moments of The Bombing of Germany goes straight to this conclusion when it says that by the time the war ended, the bombing left “both German cities and America’s lofty ideals in ruins.”

But, fortunately, there was more to this documentary than the facile conclusion that the bombing of Germany was so immoral that it cannot be defended even in a war in which the future of civilization was at stake. By the time the 50-minute film was over, liberals expecting another trashing of America were left with some conclusions that not only reinforce the morality of American tactics during that war but also could affect the way we think about contemporary conflicts.

The story of the bombing offensive is complex. During the war, Britain’s Royal Air Force believed that the key to knocking German war industries was to burn down the cities where the factories existed. From their frame of reference, there was no moral distinction between the factories themselves and the homes of the defense workers who created the material that enabled the Nazi regime to commit the crimes against humanity that made the war a matter of life or death for the free world.

But the United States Army Air Force, equipped with more sophisticated planes and bombsights, as well as a more romantic notion about the distinction between government and civilian targets in a totalitarian state, disagreed. The Americans believed that by flying during the day when visibility was obviously better (the British flew at night), their planes could knock out strategic targets without having to attack entire cities. The results produced by this theory were not that good. Much damage was caused to the German war effort, but the losses of American planes (especially before the introduction of a long-range fighter plane in 1944 that would make it safer for U.S. bombers to fly over Germany) made it too expensive to continue. By contrast, the British weeklong raid on Hamburg in 1943, in which the entire city was hit, was a major blow to the German war effort. At the time, Nazi armaments minister Albert Speer told Hitler that a few more raids like Hamburg would bring the German war effort to a halt.

It is telling that the documentary treats the achievement of air superiority over Normandy before the D-Day landings in France as the Allied Air Forces' greatest achievement. But it does not mention that both American and British air commanders bitterly resented being distracted from their plans to level Germany in order to support the landings by softening up military targets in France. But that is just the prelude to what the filmmakers and some of their consultants see as the moral turning point of the war for America — the bombings of Berlin and Dresden in February 1945 in which there was no pretense that the attack was anything but an attempt to destroy the city. The Dresden raid, immortalized in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five, has been widely represented by many American, English, and German historians as immoral because the beautiful medieval city was not considered a military target and heretofore had been spared the devastation that rained down on other German cities. It is here that author Don Miller, one of the prominent voices heard in the film, describes the raid as the crossing of “a moral threshold ... that we will not deliberately bomb civilians … once we crossed the moral divide in Berlin, it made everything else, including the atomic bomb, a little bit easier.”

But Miller is not the only voice heard about the raids against Berlin and Dresden. The film goes on to credit these devastating attacks for helping to make the Soviet assault on Eastern Germany, including the conquest of Berlin, easier. Moreover, the film points out that in a total war against a ruthless foe, half measures are of no use. After all, the ordinary Germans who served in Adolf Hitler’s army and worked in the factories that produced the weapons and other material that made his crimes possible never wavered in their loyalty to the Nazi regime, even as the Reich was reduced to ruins around them. This fact undermines the notion that Allied air-war theorists fervently believed in: that bombing could break the will of a nation. But Allied bombing attacks that literally destroyed the physical structures of the enemy’s war effort did work and, in fact, helped shorten the length of the bloodiest war in history.

The most devastating line of the film is its last, in which historian Conrad C. Crane, director of the U.S. Army Military History Institute, confronts the moral dilemma of killing civilians in a righteous war against an immoral opponent. While the question of the deaths of civilians is one we must ponder, Conrad insists, “The most unethical act for the Allies in World War II would have been allowing themselves to lose.”

This is a concept that applies not only to the war against Hitler but also to the one that America is currently fighting against Islamo-fascists. We have heard a great deal in the past few years about unethical tactics both in terms of attacking terrorist strongholds and in dealing with prisoners who possess information about future threats. As the Obama administration tries to avoid further debacles like its reaction to the Christmas Day bombing attempt over Detroit and to maintain pressure on the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the conclusion of The Bombing of Germany should haunt them. It is all well and good to try to earn applause for being more moral than our opponents. But when facing an enemy whose goal is the destruction of our society and the murder of countless innocents, the prime objective must remain the same as it was in World War II. Allowing ourselves to lose such a war is the most unethical act imaginable.

About the Author

Jonathan Tobin is executive editor of COMMENTARY.

Taking Tea with the Taliban

Michael Rubin From issue: February 2010

Addressing the nation on December 1, 2009, President Barack Obama laid out the case for an augmented American presence in Afghanistan to battle the Taliban forces seeking to push their way back into power. “Over the last several years, the Taliban has maintained common cause with al-Qaeda, as they both seek an overthrow of the Afghan government,” he declared. The president offered a brief account of the Taliban’s rise to power before the U.S. tossed them out in November 2001. “Al-Qaeda’s base of operations was in Afghanistan,” he said, “where they were harbored by the Taliban—a ruthless, repressive, and radical movement that seized control of that country after it was ravaged by years of Soviet occupation and civil war, and after the attention of America and our friends had turned elsewhere.”

This has become the standard history of the American role in Afghanistan in the 1990s, and it is certainly true that in the first few years after the 1989 Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, Washington’s attention drifted. The first President Bush allowed his one term in office to end without ensuring that the United States had a working embassy in Kabul. His envoy to the Afghan resistance, Peter Tomsen, was based in Washington, and Bill Clinton, when he came into office in 1993, never appointed a successor.

But events did not allow the Clinton administration to ignore Afghanistan for long—and here is where the true story of the American role there in the 1990s diverges from the standard history. In 1994 the Taliban, originally a group of seminary students reacting against the lawlessness and abuses of Afghan warlords, seized the province of Kandahar. In 1996 they took Kabul, and by 1998 they were in control of 90 percent of Afghanistan and had launched a reign of terror on women and ethnic minorities, forbidding the schooling of girls and banning television and music.

And in 1995 the Clinton administration began a policy of attempting to engage the Taliban. The story of this effort has never been told in full. I first became aware of U.S. engagement with the Taliban during a stint as an intern at the U.S. Embassy in Tajikistan in 1997. Declassified State Department cables now show that efforts at engagement began just three months after the group emerged in Kandahar in 1994 and well over a year before it took Kabul. The story the documents tell is one of engagement for its own sake—without any consideration given to the behavior or sincerity of an unambiguously hostile interlocutor.

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On February 13, 1995, U.S. diplomats stationed in Pakistan traveled to Kandahar to meet with seven senior Taliban officials. The meeting was largely informational. The Taliban’s rise had taken the world by surprise, and diplomats and intelligence agencies scrambled to determine who the Taliban were and what they wanted. The Taliban were willing to talk but not say much. While American diplomats observed that the group “appeared well--disposed toward the United States,” the Taliban representatives did not answer questions about their leadership and intentions. Later the same week, another U.S. diplomat met a Taliban “insider” who told the official what he wanted to hear: the Taliban liked the United States, had no objection to elections in Afghanistan, and were suspicious of both Saudi and Pakistani intentions. This was nonsense, but it was manna for American diplomats who wanted to believe that engagement was possible.

As the dialogue with the Taliban continued into 1996, it became clear to American officials that the Taliban wished to improve their image, which had been sullied by atrocities they had committed against prisoners and by the medieval restrictions they were imposing on women (mere harbingers, it would turn out, of the horrors that followed when they took control of the country in 1998). Thomas W. Simons, then the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and a career foreign-service officer, seized on this to justify further engagement. “Their concern about their image,” he wrote, “and request that A/S [Assistant Secretary Robin] Raphel ‘tell President Clinton and the West that we are not bad people,’ demonstrated a growing awareness, previously absent, of their own limitations—which may be the modality through which they can be coaxed, over time, to the negotiating table.”

As Simons sought to engage the Taliban, Timothy Carney, another career diplomat who was serving as ambassador to Sudan, was lobbying the Sudanese government to expel Osama bin Laden, who was already wanted for attacks in Yemen and Egypt. Bin Laden quickly relocated to the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad. There he was embraced by the Taliban. Indeed, even before the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, a political officer from the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan met with the Taliban’s deputy foreign-affairs adviser to urge the group to cease sheltering Bin Laden.

Any inclination the Taliban might have had to take U.S. demands seriously was undercut nine days later when, immediately after the fall of Kabul, Secretary of State Warren Christopher instructed U.S. diplomats in Pakistan to let the Taliban know that “we wish to engage the new ‘interim government’ at an early stage.” He asked the embassy to let the new regime know that U.S. diplomats “would like to make frequent trips to Kabul to stay in contact with your government.” Foreign-service officers in Pakistan embraced this directive. Pakistan clearly supported the Taliban, so working with the Taliban would at minimum allow the embassy to avoid antagonizing its host.

Simons arranged a meeting with Taliban acting Foreign Minister Mullah Ghaus to discuss the fact that terrorists were receiving safe haven in Taliban-controlled territory. It was not a productive session. Ghaus denied the presence of any terrorists on Afghan soil but suggested that the Taliban could be more helpful if they received U.S. funding. Less than a month later, Simons’s deputy John Holzman met with Ghaus to repeat U.S. demands about Bin Laden, which Ghaus dismissed.

Despite this record of failure, when Madeleine Albright succeeded Christopher as secretary of state in January 1997, efforts to engage the Taliban gathered steam. Enthusiasm for dialogue, especially among U.S. diplomats based in Pakistan, supplanted any introspection about its wisdom. Simply sitting down for tea with a diplomat fulfilled the Taliban’s major needs before bargaining ever began. Engagement ironically removed any incentive the Taliban had to cease sponsoring terror or mitigate human-rights abuses.

Diplomats met Taliban representatives every few weeks. There was no effort to limit U.S. outreach to junior officials. Robin Raphel traveled repeatedly to the region to meet Taliban representatives. What resulted was theater: the Taliban would stonewall on terrorism but would also dangle just enough hope to keep diplomats calling and forestall punitive strategies. It was not hard for the Taliban to string diplomats along. On January 16, 1997, Holzman suggested that the Taliban allow a U.S. team to visit the sites of terrorist camps to confirm the alleged cessation of activity therein. Wakil Ahmed, a political adviser to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, agreed at first; but over subsequent weeks, he offered a litany of excuses to delay the visit—the Ramadan fast, winter snows, and scheduling difficulties. Eventually the offer was rescinded altogether.

Once again, the State Department walked away empty-handed, while the Taliban had secured for themselves a four-month reprieve from pressure at the very moment that al-Qaeda was using its Afghanistan base to plot attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Making the State Department’s proposal for on-site inspection more ludicrous was the simple fact that satellite monitoring could give the United States a more accurate picture of the goings-on than a guided tour of sanitized camps.

Despite the failure of the Holzman initiative, there was little debate about the wisdom of accepting a Taliban offer to receive a senior State Department delegation inside Afghanistan. On March 2 and 3, 1997, a team of U.S. officials visited Kabul and Kandahar. Donald Camp, the deputy director of the State Department’s South Asia / Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh unit, again asked the Taliban to expel Bin Laden. The group demurred. Mullah Ehsanullah Ehsan, an influential member of the Taliban’s governing council, dismissed U.S. demands, saying that Bin Laden had been “invited to Afghanistan by the enemies of the Taliban,” but that the Taliban could not sanction his expulsion. To do so would violate Afghan culture. By saying this, the Taliban demonstrated their sophisticated understanding of American diplomatic mores, for when American diplomats face a conflict between national security and cultural relativism, they usually defer to the latter.

Camp, who was subsequently promoted to handle South Asian affairs on Clinton’s National Security Council, concluded that the Taliban’s refusal to budge on Bin Laden justified further engagement. Camp’s conviction should not surprise: once the State Department leadership had settled on engagement as a strategy, it was all but given that diplomats would validate it without letting the evidence of purposelessness and failure interfere.

Thus, the State Department’s “Afghan Coordination Group” ran through the list of problems with Taliban rule—everything from sheltering Bin Laden to human rights—and even so, recommended that Washington pursue a strategy of “restrained engagement.” As Holzman explained in a memo, “Not to engage the Taliban would be a mistake because such a policy will most likely leave them only more isolated, possibly more dangerous, and certainly more susceptible to those wishing to direct Taliban energies beyond Afghanistan.”

Fear of inducing isolation, however, did not play a role when it came to U.S. policy toward the Northern Alliance, the group of one-time Afghan rebels and chieftains that constituted the only serious resistance to the Taliban. Most countries refused to recognize the Taliban and maintained relations with the Northern Alliance. In August 1997, a fistfight broke out between the chargé d’affaires at Afghanistan’s embassy in Washington, who represented the Northern Alliance, and a more junior diplomat who pledged loyalty to the Taliban. The State Department responded by closing the embassy, sending all diplomats packing.

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How did the State Department envision engagement with the Taliban? Holzman suggested testing the group’s intentions by accepting their offer to fund crop-substitution programs (for the purpose of halting the heroin trade) and financing the girls’ schools that the Taliban said they would tolerate but did not have the capacity to fund. Such an approach was preposterous, and not even just in retrospect. Money is fungible. Any support to the Taliban would not only reward poor behavior but also raise the capacity of the regime to support terror. Holzman further suggested that Washington encourage “moderate Islamic states such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and perhaps Indonesia” to engage the Taliban bilaterally. That the State Department considered Saudi Arabia, a prime enabler of al-Qaeda, to be a moderating influence demonstrates just how far afield it had strayed from sensible policy. At the same time, the State Department’s Pakistan unit wanted to remain the point group for the initiative and insisted that all engagement be conducted through the U.S. mission in Pakistan. Because the Taliban, at this point, controlled all of Afghanistan’s border posts with Pakistan, this left the Northern Alliance further isolated. Repeated Northern Alliance appeals to U.S. diplomats in Tajikistan, a country that did share a border with those parts of Afghanistan under the Northern Alliance, went unheeded.

Other factors also drove engagement. On April 17, 1998, Bill Richardson, Clinton’s ambassador to the United Nations, became the highest-ranking American to visit Afghanistan in 20 years. He credited himself with winning a cease-fire in the civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. There followed some of the most intense fighting of the civil war. The standoff between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance would continue until the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

The Clinton administration also welcomed Taliban delegations to the United States. The California-based oil company UNOCAL brought Taliban officials to the United States to meet Assistant Secretary of State Karl Inderfurth. They broke no new ground: the Taliban defended their treatment of women as being in conformity with Afghan custom. Inderfurth delegated discussion of Bin Laden to a subordinate. Amir Khan Mottaqi, the Taliban’s acting minister of Islam and culture, deflected the issue as the Taliban had in all previous meetings but promised that they would “keep their commitment and not allow terrorists to use Afghanistan as a base for terrorism.” Ahmad Jan, the acting Taliban minister of mines and industry, added that they had also muzzled Bin Laden, an assertion that went unchallenged despite the fact that Bin Laden had sat for an interview with CNN during the previous year.

The Taliban made a hash of both its assurances. It allowed ABC News to interview Bin Laden on May 28, 1998. Ten weeks later, on August 7, 1998, suicide truck bombers attacked U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 200 people and wounding more than 4,000. Thirteen days after that, Clinton ordered a cruise-missile strike on a factory in Sudan and a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. Any notion that engagement had convinced the Taliban to cease support for terrorism should have evaporated. It didn’t.

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The missile strike outraged Mullah Omar. He telephoned Michael Malinkowski, the director of the Pakistan-Afghanistan-Bangladesh bureau at the State Department, denied that Bin Laden had planned terrorism while on Afghan soil, and reiterated that he was “open to dialogue.” Malinkowski duly reported that the Taliban were interested in further dialogue, even as he acknowledged that “this is a long way, however, from the Taliban doing the right thing on Bin Laden.”

In subsequent months, the Taliban shifted strategy. Rather than stonewall on Bin Laden, they simply told U.S. diplomats what Washington wanted to hear. The good cop was usually Abdul Hakim Mujahid, the Taliban’s envoy to the United Nations. In a September 13 meeting in Islamabad, he told Alan Eastham, a senior diplomat at the U.S. Embassy there, that “very few Afghans are in favor of Bin Laden’s presence in Afghanistan,” and that “eighty percent of the Taliban leadership opposes his presence.” (Mujahid also assured the State Department that the Taliban would protect the famous Buddha statues in Bamiyan, which they subsequently and horrifyingly destroyed.)

The bad cop was Mullah Omar, who, less than two weeks later, faxed a letter to the State Department blasting the U.S. fixation on Bin Laden. “If you have objections to our policy or our deeds, or if you call it un-Islamic, that is not right,” Mullah Omar wrote. “All Muslims of the world agree this is Islamic, but if you still believe that it is not Islamic, then we can try to convince you [i.e., we can have a dialogue]. Our advice is change your policy.” Omar’s fax was enough to convince the secretary of state: only three months after the most horrific terrorist attacks on American interests since the 1983 Marine barracks bombing, Albright agreed “to engage in a serious and confidential dialogue with the Taliban through the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad.”

On October 11, 1998, William B. Milam, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, met Maulawi Wakil Ahmed, the Taliban foreign minister. Wakil Ahmed repeated the canard that popular sentiment in his country would not allow the Taliban to expel Bin Laden, despite the carnage in Kenya and Tanzania. Nonetheless, the State Department found promise in the discussion, even though a face-to-face meeting with Americans served only to reinforce the Taliban gang’s pretensions as a government rather than as an umbrella group for terrorists. Milam found a silver lining in the fact that Wakil Ahmed described Bin Laden as “a serious problem.”

“Now is the time to notch up the diplomatic—-repeat—diplomatic pressure,” Milam wrote. “A political / diplomatic solution to Bin Laden’s expulsion from Afghanistan may be a mite more possible now.”

The State Department’s strategy rested on “persuading” the Taliban to expel Bin Laden, and so the Clinton administration agreed to provide the Taliban with evidence of Bin Laden’s culpability. Unfortunately for the State Department’s hope that it was dealing with a minimally honest partner, on November 20, 1998, a Taliban court found Bin Laden not guilty of involvement in the East Africa bombings.

Nevertheless, eight days later, Eastham, then the top U.S. diplomat in Pakistan, visited the Taliban’s ambassador to meet Wakil Ahmed. “While it is possible that the Taliban are simply playing for time in seeking to reinvigorate the diplomatic track,” Eastham wrote, “it is at least possible that they—some of them—are serious about finding a peaceful way out.” Eastham and Wakil Ahmed met again the following month, but the Taliban only dug in their heels on Bin Laden. Before long, the Taliban were again giving Bin Laden unfettered access to the media.

Even as the cultivation of the Taliban garden refused to yield even a hint of a green shoot, area experts and former government officials—many of whom were familiar with State Department efforts—actively promoted engagement in their writings and interviews. They encouraged the Clinton administration to differentiate al-Qaeda from the Taliban and equated nuance with sophistication. Rather than see terrorism and terror sponsorship as a black-and-white issue, they urged the White House to see shades of gray. Twice in 1999, for example, in high-profile opinion pieces, Milt Bearden, the former CIA station chief in Pakistan, urged the U.S. government to engage the Taliban. In an August 13 New York Times op-ed, for example, he assured the world that the Taliban were as “eager to rid themselves of their bin Laden problem as we are to bring him to justice.”

The fiction that the Taliban and al-Qaeda were functionally different should have ended on Christmas Eve 1999, when five Pakistani nationals hijacked an Indian Airlines flight and diverted it to Afghanistan. After the plane landed in Kandahar, the Taliban resupplied the hijackers with weaponry. Nevertheless, in the wake of the hijacking, Inderfurth met senior Taliban officials and opened the session “by emphasizing the importance of continued dialogue, despite differences.” The Taliban, however, continued to stonewall.

By this point, the U.S. presidential campaign had begun in earnest, and as rogue regimes often do in election years, the Taliban simply hunkered down and awaited a new U.S. administration. Often, new presidents blame their predecessors rather than America’s adversaries for diplomacy’s failure. In this case, however, the Taliban would be disappointed. Soon after George W. Bush took office, Taliban Foreign Minister Abdul Wakil Muttawakil sent Secretary of State Colin Powell a letter seeking to restart talks. The answer must have come as a disappointment. The new State Department informed Abdul Hakim Mujahed that the group should close its office in New York.

As this account demonstrates, Obama’s statement that the United States ignored Afghanistan until 9/11 is incorrect. In point of fact, the Clinton administration pursued the Taliban with fervor. Over the course of its five-year engagement, however, the Clinton State Department gained nothing. The Taliban had, like many rogue regimes, acted in bad faith. They engaged not to compromise but to buy time. They made many promises but did not keep a single one. The Taliban refused to isolate, let alone expel, Bin Laden, and al--Qaeda metastasized. They exploited American naiveté and sincerity at the ultimate cost of several thousand lives. The report by the 9/11 Commission details how Bin Laden and his deputy, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, hatched the 9/11 plot at a meeting in Tora Bora at a time when U.S. engagement with the Taliban was in full swing.

Obviously, an honest exchange of views between nations is the vital core of foreign relations. But absent any effort to measure its success, through concrete steps taken by the other party that demonstrate sincerity, engagement too often becomes a policy conducted for its own sake rather than for the furtherance of the national interest. In the case of the Taliban engagement, the State Department fell prey to clientitis, the great occupational hazard of diplomacy—the condition that befalls diplomats who confuse their own attempts to achieve a smooth relationship with their host governments for their actual purpose, which is to secure and advance the interests of the United States. It was fantasy to believe that on issues of radical Islam and Afghanistan’s governance, U.S. and Pakistani interests could have converged.

The desire to engage meant that more-robust strategies that might have proved more effective and, with the benefit of hindsight, less costly were never attempted. Clinton called off CIA proposals to assassinate Bin Laden. His administration’s ineffective 1998 cruise-missile strike following the East Africa bombings, which seems only to have emboldened Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, allows us to consider what might have been had a targeted military strike been attempted under other circumstances. That the Taliban were hosting terrorist training camps on Afghan soil was no secret in the years before al-Qaeda attacked the U.S. Embassies in 1998; indeed, the matter was raised repeatedly during the diplomats’ tea with the Taliban. Had Clinton attempted to preempt Bin Laden’s evil rather than make a symbolic strike after the fact, which al-Qaeda had sensibly anticipated, the United States might have dealt a crushing blow to Bin Laden and simultaneously forced the Taliban leaders to reconsider the wisdom of their subterfuge.

Obama’s willingness to accept the conventional history—we lost Afghanistan because we ignored Afghanistan—is reason for grave concern. The story of Afghanistan in the 1990s is a story of the limits of diplomacy for its own sake. And diplomacy for its own sake is a cornerstone, perhaps the cornerstone, of Obama’s foreign policy. And specifically in Afghanistan, he is already signaling a readiness to repeat the mistakes of engagement with the very extremists whose behavior made possible the attacks of 9/11 and who have returned to torment Afghanistan

During his December 1, 2009, address, Obama declared, “We will support efforts by the Afghan government to open the door to those Taliban who abandon violence and respect the human rights of their fellow citizens.” His chief Afghanistan envoy, Richard Holbrooke, has handpicked a team that includes, among others, Robin Raphel, an architect of pre-9/11 efforts to engage the Taliban. Thus the mistakes of the past may be repeated, with potentially dire consequences, in the very near future.

About the Author

Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is completing a history of U.S. engagement with rogue regimes.

Taliban Threaten to Murder American Hostage Pfc. Bergdahl

PESHAWAR: The Afghan Taliban on Thursday demanded the release of Dr Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani scientist who has been convicted by the US court on charges of her alleged attempt to murder US soldiers in Afghanistan, and threatened to execute an American soldier they were holding currently. They claimed Aafia Siddiqui’s family had approached the Taliban network through a Jirga of notables, seeking their assistance to put pressure on the US to provide her justice.

“Being Muslims, it becomes our religious and moral obligation to help the distressed Pakistani woman convicted by the US court on false charges,” said a senior Afghan Taliban commander.

Quite frankly, if the Taliban have "convicted" Bergdahl they may have already murdered him. The chances of finding him alive grow smaller by the day.

We continue to hope and pray he is located and freed unharmed. But these are the Taliban. They are bloodthirsty for their own Muslim people who refuse to follow them. I don't expect much mercy or fair dealing for Pfc Bergdahl. (Howie at The Jawa Report)

UPDATE by Rusty: [snip]

... Think about the fallout of the Mohammad cartoons -- the riots, the deaths threats, the acts of terror -- and that is the scale of the outrage in the Muslim world over Siddiqui's conviction. (read it all)

The Jawa Report is exactly correct, the Taliban have no mercy. These are the same Taliban that our government wants to negotiate with, wants to pay off with millions of American dollars, the same Taliban we are expected to take at their word that they won't have anything more to do with al-Qaeda or terror. Right.

Former Republican congressional leader Newt Gingrich discusses the war on terror at the National Press Club.

Ummat-al-K


Gingrich: "I'm deeply worried"



He gave this brilliant, clear and insightful speech at the end of 2007. Over 1¼ million have watched this copy on YouTube alone, yet our so-called world "Leaders" are taking no notice. It is even more relevant today (if that is possible) than it was back then.

Please watch it then press your political representatives into action.... ...first we must STOP APPEASMENT! Let's not worry about whether we are showing them "proper respect at all times" - let's get on with the job of making them respect the laws of our countries and the lives of our fellow citizens.

UN, London Surrenders to Taliban - Offers Hundreds of Millions in Booty, "Respect," Asylum, Travel, Removal from US List

Atlas Shrugs.com

I think it very unhealthy for Islamic organizations (ie, the UN) to be dictating the terms of surrender to Islam. By g-d, whatever the West is smoking is some crazy wild shiz.

Could the Taliban be any more devoutly Islamic, violent, oppressive, misogynistic, barbaric, savage, and bloodthirsty? And yet, their names were taken off a UN sanctions list which has frozen their assets and blocked foreign travel. Any deal would also need their removal from United States "kill or capture" lists. Read that again.

And hundreds of millions of dollars in jizya.

OT (but not) US terror threat raised to severe.

Taliban leaders 'offered asylum' under London peace plan Telegraph hat tip Founding bloggers

Taliban leaders could be offered exile abroad and have their names deleted from a UN sanctions blacklist as part of a peace plan for Afghanistan to be unveiled in London next week.

A briefing paper on the Afghan government's proposals seen by The Daily Telegraph says any peace deal may include "potential exile in a third country" for insurgent leaders.

The document does not name any country, but Saudi Arabia, which recognised the former Taliban regime, is believed to be a possible candidate to give leaders a new life.

The plan was endorsed by Afghan ministers and the international community in Kabul on Tuesday. It envisages a twin-track strategy aiming separately at foot soldiers and the leadership.

After eight years of intensifying fighting Nato commanders have acknowledged political negotiation is the only solution to the worsening fighting.

They are now backing a "carrot and stick" strategy of more troops to reverse the Taliban's military momentum coupled with incentives for fighters to rejoin society.

International donors are preparing to pay hundreds of millions of pounds towards the scheme, with Japan and the US already allocating substantial budgets.

In the first phase, junior fighters, who commanders believe are mainly motivated by money, will be offered jobs, training and education if they lay down their weapons and renounce violence.

Further incentives could include pensions for older fighters and allotments of land.

Villages which persuade their men to give up their struggle will get a "peace dividend" of aid and development.

Fighters would be offered security and protection from reprisal, which has so far led to the deaths of many who have tried to defect.

A peace jirga, or tribal council, will be held by President Hamid Karzai after the London conference to kick start the plan.

A separate push will later target the Taliban high command. It could include giving them asylum or political positions if they lay down their weapons, break links with al-Qaeda and agree to abide by the Afghan constitution the paper said.

They would also see their names taken off a UN sanctions list of Taliban and al-Qaeda which has frozen their assets and blocked foreign travel. Any deal would also need their removal from United States "kill or capture" lists.

The report says: "The government reaches its hand out to the Taliban and other insurgent groups to offer them a dignified and respectful way to renounce violence and peacefully reintegrate into their communities and separate themselves from their past."

The plan will be unveiled to the London conference on Jan 28 by Mr Karzai and his adviser Mohammad Masoom Stanakzai.

Mullah Arsala Rahmani, a former Taliban deputy higher education minister who appears on the UN list despite now being a senator, said peace relied on talks with members of the insurgents' ruling Quetta Shura.

He said: "I am sure dealing with the Taliban soldiers is not the solution. They are strongly linked to their commanders and trust them. First you have to talk to the most senior people."

He said while Mullah Mohammad Omar remained the nominal head of the movement, negotiations now relied on his lieutenants in Quetta, Pakistan.

Robert Gates, US defence secretary, said earlier this week he doubted the Taliban high command would consider a settlement until the momentum of the insurgency had been reversed. He also questioned whether reconciliation with Mullah Omar was realistic.

You mean you are considering this sick fantasy, Secretary of Defense Coward?

Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, another blacklisted former Taliban ambassador who spent several years at Guantanamo, said the reintegration plan was corrupt and would hinder peace efforts.

Bwahahahahahahahaha.

"While America is talking about peace talks, on the one hand it wants to divide the Taliban and buy some of them with money, and on the other hand it sends more troops for the war," he said.

Congress Probes Alleged U.S. Bribes to Afghan Warlords

U.S. would be unintentionally involved in a protection racket and indirectly financing the enemy


WASHINGTON -- Congress is investigating allegations that U.S. tax dollars are being paid to warlords and the Taliban for security on supply routes used to truck food, water, fuel and ammunition to American troops in Afghanistan.

If the allegations are true, then the U.S. would be unintentionally involved in a protection racket and indirectly financing the enemy, Rep. John Tierney, the Massachusetts Democrat leading the inquiry, said Wednesday.

The Obama administration is escalating the U.S. mission in Afghanistan amid concerns that corruption throughout the country is a major roadblock to progress.

Bribes and kickbacks are frequently used to do business there, raising worries among many Democrats on Capitol Hill that the U.S. investment will fall short of stabilizing Afghanistan's shaky government.

Tierney is seeking documents from the Defense Department and companies connected to a $2.1 billion U.S. contract to transport goods and materiel through Pakistan to Bagram Airfield, the U.S. military's main hub in Afghanistan. From Bagram, the supplies are distributed to several hundred smaller camps and bases spread throughout the country.

Tierney said his staff has been told by credible informants that security guards hired by the trucking companies funnel money to the local warlords or the Taliban to ensure the convoys get to their destinations unscathed.

"It's protection money," said Tierney, who heads the House Oversight and Government Reform national security subcommittee. "Early indications are payments are either made as a lump sum for a period of time, or payment per container."

Multiple layers of subcontractors are often used in these transactions, making it difficult to follow the trail of cash, Tierney added.

The Defense Department had no immediate response to Tierney's investigation.

At a Dec. 2 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton acknowledged the long, rugged supply lines to landlocked Afghanistan through Pakistan's port city of Karachi offer numerous opportunities for fraud and corruption that pad the Taliban's accounts.

But Clinton said the problem is not solely an Afghan one and neither is the solution. "We just have to be honest here about how complex and difficult this problem is," she said.

The arrangement for moving supplies throughout Afghanistan, known as the Host Nation Trucking contract, began in May 2009. There are eight companies handling the work.

Before this umbrella contract was in place, there were far more contractors involved and less oversight, according to John Dawkins, chief executive officer of the Mesopotamia Group in Kabul, one of the current contractors.

But he also said it's no secret that payments are made to ensure safe passage through dangerous patches. Without U.S. or NATO security to guard the convoys and the routes, which is a risky and time intensive task, there's no other option.

"We have to pay certain security companies to get from one place to another place," Dawkins said. "And everybody's interconnected and there's huge money involved. If you don't pay for your security, you're on your own."

Dawkins also downplayed the notion that much of the money flows to the Taliban. "Most of the people are just bandits on the road," he said. "I think you'd have a really hard time defining exactly who the Taliban are."