Dementia

Oh, it just breaks your heart you know?

Every since that dementia heimers thing done got a hold of Paw Paw, the tragi comedy of errors has been like totally relentless - with only a few spots of 'what the heck?" type chiz - like the hilarious trying to feed the chickens cat litter (here's a tip - doesn't work bay bee) - to break up the steady wash of stuff that makes one think Time is predator.

Kinda like the headscratcher the white haired Congressional cat sallied forth with in the South Cackalackey DJ contest about the pre911 Buddha blower uppers that often whee laxed by executing girls in a soccer stadium

"Like to point out one thing about the Taliban. The Taliban used to be our allies when we were fighting the Russians. So Taliban are people who want — their main goal is to keep foreigners off their land. It’s the al-Qaeda — you can’t mix the two. The al-Qaeda want to come here to kill us. The Taliban just says, “We don’t want foreigners.” We need to understand that, or we can’t resolve this problem in the Middle East. We are going to spend a lot of lives and a lot of money for a long time to come."

Uh, wait, you said what now?

Everything in this statement is wrong. Everything. Let’s start with the most basic point. The Taliban most certainly were not “our allies when we were fighting the Russians.” How could they have been, considering that the Taliban did not exist at the time of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan?

To claim that the Taliban is just opposed to foreign interference in Afghanistan is patently absurd. To begin with, the Taliban’s creation was a direct result not of foreign invasion but of Afghanistan’s internecine tribal warfare after the Soviets left and the Americans lost interest. Its unabashed goal was to crush Afghan factions that impeded its establishment of a retrograde sharia state.

Moreover, the Taliban craves foreign interference, without which it would never have come to power. A Pashtun movement driven by Islamic scholars and spearheaded by Mullah Mohammed Omar in Kandahar, the Taliban owes its existence to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Two of the only three nations in the world to recognize the Taliban-led government in Kabul, nurtured, armed, and financed the Taliban in its origin. 

 They did so precisely because the Taliban was an effective ally in their machinations against regional rivals — India for the Pakistanis and Iran for the Saudis. The alliance was also grounded in the Taliban’s espousal of Deobandism, an uncompromising construction of you know whatslam propagated in Afghan madrassas built by the Saudis’ m"Hammedist World League in conjunction with Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s supremacist movement.

Even after Congress authorized the use of military force, 43 pointedly asked the Taliban to hand bin Laden and his organization over to Great Satan so that they could be tried — bin Laden having been indicted years earlier by an American grand jury.  Taliban repeatedly refused. The choice at that point was either to invade, overthrow the Taliban, and smash al-Qaeda, or to let it be known that Great Satan would tolerate a massive attack on our homeland. That was no choice at all.

What about the not digging foreigners part?

Taliban does not say, “We don’t want foreigners.” If you are an Arab jihadist, an operative of Pakistan’s heavily Islamist intelligence service, or a Saudi Wahhabist royal ready to build Afghanistan’s next-generation madrassas, the Taliban is delighted to have you in their country. It is non-m"Hammedists they don’t want. And such superpowers that they especially despise, since these they see as standing athwart their divine mission to subject the world to the rule of "slamic law.

That is why they protected al-Qaeda even at the cost of their own power. That is why negotiating with them is self-defeating and leaving them alone is suicidal.

Pic - "As long as the Taliban believe that they have a backer in Pakistan, even if is passive backing to provide safe havens, they are inclined to play the long game with the United States, which is to wait it out in Afghanistan."