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| Afghanistan |
| A Tale Of Two Skepticisms: Fighting And Talking With The Taliban During The Obama Years |
| 2020-02-28 |
| Long, so just excerpting a few paragraphs. [WarOnTheRocks] When I saw the Washington Post reports on the so-called Afghanistan papers, claiming that "senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan ... making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable," it took me back to a conversation I had with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the May 2012 NATO Summit in Chicago. Lying, warmongering pieces of shit. Hang all of them in front of the US Capitol for treason. The Post based its coverage on interviews conducted by the office of the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction with serving and former officials of the U.S. government, including me. From April 2009 to October 2013, I served as senior adviser to the U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. I had been hired by that position’s first incumbent, the late Richard Holbrooke, who died from a torn aorta that erupted during a Dec. 10, 2010, meeting in Clinton’s office. That was less than two years after he was sworn in and less than two weeks after the first diplomatic contact between the United States and the Taliban since 9/11, at a safe house outside of Munich. Opening that channel had been my principal task. In May 2012, as adviser to Holbrooke’s successor, Marc Grossman, I attended the NATO summit, where, according to the Chicago Tribune, "the main agenda item was the future of Afghanistan." In his opening address, President Barack Obama called for a "transformational decade of peace." |
| Posted by:Herb McCoy |