[PJMedia] Nothing illustrates the folly of our 18-year-long nation-building mission in Afghanistan better than the partial peace bought by a months-long negotiation breaking down after just 72 hours.AFP also reports, "three killed, 11 injured in blast in east Afghanistan," so you know the Taliban wasn't kidding around. The "operation," as the Taliban likes to call it, or "savage terror attack," as any honest person would call it, was in response to confusion between the Trump White House and the Afghan central government over the release of up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners.
to release the Taliban prisoners," and that doing so "can’t be a precondition" for continued peace talks. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reminded Face the Nation yesterday morning that "There have been prisoner releases from both sides before; we have managed to figure our path forward," but maybe 5,000 was just too big a figure for Ghani to swallow.
The sane U.S. response would be to pack it up and go home.
There's no peace to be found in Afghanistan, at least not with the low level of violence we're willing to commit there. More than 18 years after the attacks of 9/11/2001, the American people don't have the stomach for killing the number of fighting-age males it would take to force peace on the Taliban. And any attempt at a power-sharing arrangement between the Taliban and Kabul -- the administration's current goal -- is doomed to failure. Kabul is corrupt to its core, and will never earn the love or respect of the Afghan people. As for the Taliban, for them, power-sharing is nothing more than a necessary step on the way to toppling the Ghani government. Even then, fighting in the countryside would continue, so it doesn't matter much who ostensibly is in charge in Kabul.