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Camptown Races

By Mahons On September 9th, 2019

Im not sure if laughter is the appropriate response to President Trump’s tweet cancelling meeting with the Taliban at Camp David. But it was my reaction.
The perpetual grievanes and duplicity of the various Afghan factions makes conventional negotiations impossible. Having them come to Camp David for “talks” is an absurdity. Id have more respect if he invited them to one of his golf clubs for a few rounds. Of course they might view the phrase a few rounds differently.
Afghanistan remains an ungovernable disaster and will likely remain so for the duration of time. Efforts to enlighten, educate and improve are simply alien to its people’s core beliefs.
To think that a lasting agreement for a sustainable peace could be achieved

Posted in ATW |

19 Responses to “Camptown Races”

  1. Phantom, on September 9th, 2019 at 1:51 PM Said:

    Trump had planned to hand over Afghanistan to the Taliban during the week of Sept 11.

    Oh yes he did

  2. Noel, on September 9th, 2019 at 2:19 PM Said:

    //Trump had planned to hand over Afghanistan to the Taliban during the week of Sept 11.//

    Yes.

    But that’s just another example of the vastness of his ego. He honestly can’t see beyond the horizons of the world he imagines around himself. Just as he has absolutely no reference in the real word for judging the truth of anything he says or tweets, rather than what he would simply like to believe, he can’t imagine anything or anyone outside himself deserving consideration. Only he has a right to feel insulted.

    BTW Was this Taliban bash generally known before he decided to cancel it publically? Some media refer to it as being secret, others don’t.

  3. Mahons, on September 9th, 2019 at 2:22 PM Said:

    I’m not sure it enjoyed any more secrecy than has been exhibited in the past by the Administration.

  4. Phantom, on September 9th, 2019 at 2:24 PM Said:

    The elected Afghan govt has not been part of the negotiations

    Trump -only- negotiated with the Taliban, the friends of Al Queda.

  5. Emerald Pimpernel, on September 9th, 2019 at 2:56 PM Said:

    With the flipflopper in chief don’t be so sure he won’t do it anyway

  6. Phantom, on September 9th, 2019 at 2:58 PM Said:

    I want the local Trumpers to justify negotiating with the enablers of 9/11 with a desired grand finale at the week of 9/11

    I am begging for them to justify this in some way

  7. Paul McMahon, on September 9th, 2019 at 4:12 PM Said:

    The elected Afghan govt has not been part of the negotiations

    Trump -only- negotiated with the Taliban, the friends of Al Queda

    Wow! If that’s true, just……wow.

  8. Phantom, on September 9th, 2019 at 4:51 PM Said:

    Why is the Afghan government excluded?

    The Taliban has long refused to negotiate with the Afghan government, which has repeatedly invited the group for talks with no success.

    Washington initially tried to get the Taliban to agree to talking with Kabul, too. But when the Taliban refused to do so, the US was left with no option but to enter into talks with it.

    The Taliban has given several reasons on why it is not willing to talk to the Afghan government.

    Since the Taliban was overthrown in 2001, the group maintains that the country has been occupied by foreign forces.

    It says the Kabul government has no real power and considers it a “puppet regime”. The group says any engagement with the government would grant it legitimacy.

    In July, however, dozens of high-profile Afghan politicians and civil society activists, including women, met the Taliban in Doha for a two-day intra-Afghan dialogue.

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/05/taliban-talks-peace-afghanistan-190510062940394.html

    Trump may have had little choice, but he did agree to exclude the Afghan govt. Which yes is amazing.

  9. Phantom, on September 9th, 2019 at 5:29 PM Said:

    Donald J. Trump
    ✔
    @realDonaldTrump
    While @BarackObama is slashing the military, he is also negotiating with our sworn enemy the Taliban–who facilitated 9/11.

    3,905
    4:14 PM – Jan 13, 2012

    The fake president publicly criticized Obama for…talking to the Taliban.

    Now, let’s look at our own files from September 2012

    The Taliban are savages and NO deal should be done with them. It doesn’t matter if they disown Al Queda are not. They are barbarians. If we accommodate them in the way outlined we betray every US and UK soldier murdered by them. Let’s get out of Afghanistan now and use drones to obliterate ANY who threaten us.

    http://www.atangledweb.org/?p=35080#comments

  10. Seamus, on September 9th, 2019 at 5:42 PM Said:

    Afghanistan, like many post-colonial countries with artificial borders, could probably benefit from a healthy dose of balkanisation. Certainly there is grounds for partitioning the southern, primarily Pashtun, part of it. What happens in the north is more complicated. Whether it continues to exist as a union of its non-Pashtun peoples or is in turn subdivived into its ethnic groups and merged with their neighbouring countries (primarily Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan), with maybe an independent Hazaragi state (or where that group is merged into Iran), remains to be seen.

  11. Phantom, on September 9th, 2019 at 5:54 PM Said:

    I know that Afghanistan is complicated, but weren’t its borders have been ” artificial ” even before the era of the British empire

  12. Seamus, on September 9th, 2019 at 6:00 PM Said:

    The border between Pakistan and Afghanistan largely was drawn by a British diplomat Mortimer Durand in 1893, largely deciding where British India ended and to hell with the local communities who suddenly found themselves on different sides of an international border. The eastern border was decided by British diplomat Frederic John Goldsmid in 1872. And its northern border largely represents the territorial extension of the old Russian empire.

  13. Phantom, on September 9th, 2019 at 6:05 PM Said:

    I’d think that any of the old Afghan borders would have been just as flawed

    http://www.geocurrents.info/geopolitics/the-afghan-%E2%80%9Cgraveyard-of-empires%E2%80%9D-myth-and-the-wakhan-corridor

  14. Seamus, on September 9th, 2019 at 6:07 PM Said:

    Sure. Not least because there isn’t really an Afghan people. So, overwhelmingly, any Afghanistan is going be a multi ethnic state surrounded by countries to whom their ethnic groups belong to.

  15. Mahons, on September 9th, 2019 at 7:26 PM Said:

    Nice work Phantom.

  16. Colm, on September 9th, 2019 at 8:16 PM Said:

    I won’t believe Trump has done anything wrong until Patrick says he has. 😉

  17. Allan@Aberdeen, on September 9th, 2019 at 10:52 PM Said:

    I want the local Trumpers to justify negotiating with the enablers of 9/11 with a desired grand finale at the week of 9/11

    I’m not a Trumper, not any more anyway, but I’ll bite:

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.terrorism5

    President George Bush rejected as “non-negotiable” an offer by the Taliban to discuss turning over Osama bin Laden if the United States ended the bombing in Afghanistan.

    Returning to the White House after a weekend at Camp David, the president said the bombing would not stop, unless the ruling Taliban “turn [bin Laden] over, turn his cohorts over, turn any hostages they hold over.” He added, “There’s no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he’s guilty”. In Jalalabad, deputy prime minister Haji Abdul Kabir – the third most powerful figure in the ruling Taliban regime – told reporters that the Taliban would require evidence that Bin Laden was behind the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US, but added: “we would be ready to hand him over to a third country”.

    To me, the Taliban’s position was entirely reasonable – let us see prima facie evidence of OBL’s culpability and we’ll hand him over. Yet, even today, the FBI states that there is no evidence linking OBL to 9/11. GWB, on the other hand , said

    “There’s no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he’s guilty”

    Let’s see what has come out of an assessment of building 7…….

    https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1175375/9-11-world-trade-center-twin-towers-September-11-conspiracy-theories

    Following an extensive four-year study at the University of Alaska, using four extremely complex computer models, Dr. Leroy Hulsey, Dr. Zhili Quan, and Professor Feng Xiao found the “fire did not cause the collapse”.

    In their report, it says: “The principal conclusion of our study is that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST [National Institute of Standards and Technology] and private engineering firms that studied the collapse.

    “The secondary conclusion of our study is that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.”

  18. Allan@Aberdeen, on September 9th, 2019 at 10:54 PM Said:

    Here’s why US-military Inc. invaded Afghanistan – check 2001 in the graph below

    https://news.un.org/en/sites/news.un.org.en/files/legacy-news-images/photos/large/2017/November/Afghan_opium_survey-01.jpg

  19. Paul McMahon, on September 10th, 2019 at 5:54 PM Said:

    According to reports Trump fired Bolton:

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49655279

    A sailor’s pay packet in Amsterdam lasts longer than a Trump staffer.

    Where Bolton contradicts Trump’s version of this is however where it gets interesting:

    https://twitter.com/AmbJohnBolton/status/1171455806069305346

    I think this is going to be messy.

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