Peter Dow’s “no” to Taliban’s surrender terms. Afpak strategy for victory in war on terror. (YouTube)

CBS News: Divisions within Taliban make peace elusive

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta made news Wednesday when he said the combat role for U.S. troops in Afghanistan could end next year instead of 2014. On Thursday, he took a step back — insisting U.S. forces will remain combat ready — even as they transition into their new role of training Afghan troops.

Another part of the U.S. strategy involves getting the Taliban to hold peace talks with the Afghan government. CBS News correspondent Clarissa Ward spoke with some top Taliban representatives where they live in Pakistan.

They call Sami ul Haq the “Father of the Taliban,” one of Pakistan’s most well-known and hard-line Islamists.

Ward visited ul Haq at his religious school near the Afghan border. Many Afghan Taliban leaders and fighters studied there, earning it the nickname the “University of Jihad.”

Ul Haq said that top Taliban figures are receptive to the idea of peace talks, but that three key conditions must be met first: The Americans must leave Afghanistan, he told Ward. Secondly, Taliban leaders should be released from Guantonamo. The third demand is there should be no outside interference in Afghanistan.

It’s unlikely that American negotiators will accept these terms, though a release of some prisoners from Guantanamo Bay has been discussed.

While some elements of the Taliban’s leadership may be supportive of peace talks, there are clear signs that divisions exist within the group. Many of the younger, more militant foot soldiers insisting that they are not ready to stop fighting.

At a small guesthouse on the outskirts of Islamabad, CBS News had the rare chance to sit down with a young Taliban commander from Helmand province. For security reasons, he asked that his face be not shown.

“If these talks in Doha are successful and Taliban leaders tell you and your fighters to put down your arms, will you do it?” asked Ward.

“No, it will not happen,” he said. “And those who are talking to the political wing of the Taliban should understand that real peace is only possible by talking to the ground fighters.”

“So the bottom line is you’re not willing to compromise, you’re not willing to collaborate? Is there any chance of peace?”

“If the Afghan government announced tomorrow that strict Islamic law would be reinstated, we would accept that,” he said, “but those in power now will never go along with that.”

For the moment, there is a huge gulf between what the Taliban and their backers want and what America would be willing to accept.

So the Deans of Jihad have dictated terms to the West, the terms they propose of the West’s surrender to the Jihadis in the war on terror.

So what should the response of the West be? Should we surrender to the Jihadis, or should we fight to win?

This guy Sami ul Haq should be a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp along with his University of Jihad colleagues, his controllers from the Pakistani ISI and his financial backers from Saudi Arabia.

The US and Western allies ought to name Pakistan and Saudi Arabia as “state sponsors of terrorism”.

There ought to be drone strikes on the University of Jihad. (Darul Uloom Haqqania, Akora Khattak, Pakistan)

We ought to seize control of Pakistani and Saudi TV satellites and use them to broadcast propaganda calling for the arrest of all involved in waging terrorist war against the West.

It just seems very poor tactics for our military to be risking life and limb in the minefields of Afghanistan yet at the strategic level our governments and businesses are still “trading with the enemy”.

As the Star Trek character Commander Scott might have said -

“It’s war, Captain but not as we know it.”

Republican Intelligence forum of the For Freedom Forums

Rice for President Yahoo Group

“U.S. Ponders Ways to Use Force on Iran”

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“Saudis Deny U.S. Planned to Attack Iranian Oilfields”

“U.S. May Attack Iran Missiles: White House Mulls Ways to Protect Gulf”

“[U.S.] Navy Denies Plan to Attack Iranian Ships in Persian Gulf”

“U.S., Allies Setting Stage to Attack Iran, Says Paper”

“Chavez Warns Against U.S. Attack on Iran”

“Iran’s Top Leader Warns of U.S. Attack”

“Iran: U.S. Attack May Mean ‘Slaughterhouse’”

“Sharon on the Warpath: Is Israel Planning to Attack Iran?”

“Israel Has Plans to Attack Iran, Says London Times”

“U.S. Planning Nuclear Strike on Iran”

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“Report: Israel Asks for ‘Air Corridor’ to Attack Iran”

“News from Israel: [U.S. President] Wants to Attack Iran Soon”

“Iran in U.S. Crosshairs”

Do those headlines sound familiar? Judging by the recent deluge of print, web, television, and radio reports and discussions, America and Israel have responded to a growing “drumbeat for war,” as some have put it, and are on the brink of launching an overt military attack on Iran. As the real newspaper and web headlines cited above clearly show, the U.S. and its ally in the Levant have failed to learn the proverbial dangers of a land war in Asia, and are furiously building toward another engagement with another Islamic country.

But wait. The dates on those headlines are, respectively, November 1979, December 1979, August 1980, August 1980, June 1984, June 1987, March 1988, November 1992, November 1993, December 1996, June 1997, August 2004, March 2005, April 2006, July 2006, February 2007, May 2008, and February 2009.

That’s right: the claim that America or Israel is on the cusp of attacking Iran is as old as the Islamic Republic itself. Such assertions have peppered media reports, op-eds, and other commentary for three decades and change at this point – a fact which should give folks pause about taking such claims any more seriously now than at any point in recent history.

Yes, Iran is hostile to the U.S. and its interests, and yes, it is almost certainly working as quickly as it can on the development of a nuclear weapon. However, despite growing hysteria on the part of media and analysts, and despite public debates like that being hosted by Foreign Affairs (the best piece among which is this one by Colin Kahl, former head of Middle East policy at the Pentagon), a western-initiated war with Iran is little more likely now than at any point in the last three decades, if not altogether less so.

Read More →

“U.S. Ponders Ways to Use Force on Iran”

“Here’s How the U.S. Could Invade Iran”

“U.S. Said Set to Attack Iran”

“Does [the U.S. President] Plan to Invade Iran?”

“Saudis Deny U.S. Planned to Attack Iranian Oilfields”

“U.S. May Attack Iran Missiles: White House Mulls Ways to Protect Gulf”

“[U.S.] Navy Denies Plan to Attack Iranian Ships in Persian Gulf”

“U.S., Allies Setting Stage to Attack Iran, Says Paper”

“Chavez Warns Against U.S. Attack on Iran”

“Iran’s Top Leader Warns of U.S. Attack”

“Iran: U.S. Attack May Mean ‘Slaughterhouse’”

“Sharon on the Warpath: Is Israel Planning to Attack Iran?”

“Israel Has Plans to Attack Iran, Says London Times”

“U.S. Planning Nuclear Strike on Iran”

“The Coming War with Iran”

“Report: Israel Asks for ‘Air Corridor’ to Attack Iran”

“News from Israel: [U.S. President] Wants to Attack Iran Soon”

“Iran in U.S. Crosshairs”

Do those headlines sound familiar? Judging by the recent deluge of print, web, television, and radio reports and discussions, America and Israel have responded to a growing “drumbeat for war,” as some have put it, and are on the brink of launching an overt military attack on Iran. As the real newspaper and web headlines cited above clearly show, the U.S. and its ally in the Levant have failed to learn the proverbial dangers of a land war in Asia, and are furiously building toward another engagement with another Islamic country.

But wait. The dates on those headlines are, respectively, November 1979, December 1979, August 1980, August 1980, June 1984, June 1987, March 1988, November 1992, November 1993, December 1996, June 1997, August 2004, March 2005, April 2006, July 2006, February 2007, May 2008, and February 2009.

That’s right: the claim that America or Israel is on the cusp of attacking Iran is as old as the Islamic Republic itself. Such assertions have peppered media reports, op-eds, and other commentary for three decades and change at this point – a fact which should give folks pause about taking such claims any more seriously now than at any point in recent history.

Yes, Iran is hostile to the U.S. and its interests, and yes, it is almost certainly working as quickly as it can on the development of a nuclear weapon. However, despite growing hysteria on the part of media and analysts, and despite public debates like that being hosted by Foreign Affairs (the best piece among which is this one by Colin Kahl, former head of Middle East policy at the Pentagon), a western-initiated war with Iran is little more likely now than at any point in the last three decades, if not altogether less so.

Read More →

TEN YEARS HAVE passed since terrorists hijacked airliners and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  In that period, America has fought wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, carried out hundreds armed drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen (among other locations), and conducted covert operations around the world, all in the name of what President George W.  Bush termed the “Global War on Terror.”  Terror plots and attempted attacks have been foiled, terrorist leaders have been killed or captured in massive numbers – including the world’s most wanted terrorist himself, Osama bin Laden.  All of this has combined, in the words of President Barack Obama, to “put al Qaeda on the path to defeat.”

Given all this, is it possible that America is actually losing the war on terror? In Bin Laden’s Legacy: Why We’re Still Losing the War on Terror, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, argues not only that we are losing, but that we as a nation still fail to understand what kind of a war we are fighting, and what our enemies’ actual goals are.  This is a powerful indictment, and Gartenstein-Ross painstakingly lays it out in a book that is both sharply analytical and accessible to any audience.

A KEY PROBLEM with America’s attempt to wage a War on Terror while safeguarding itself from future attack, Gartenstein-Ross writes, is that our ignorance of the enemy we are facing has allowed us to pursue both goals in a profligate fashion that plays right into the hands of an enemy that sees America’s economy as the long-term target.  To understand the reasoning behind this, we must look to the Soviet Union.  Though myriad factors contributed to the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., its collapse so shortly after its withdrawal from a decade-long quagmire in Afghanistan helped convince Osama bin Laden and other former mujahedeen that they had been the cause of its ultimate defeat.

Now, al Qaeda has taken this strategy of embroiling a much larger and wealthier enemy in a long and costly war of economic attrition and has aimed it at the United States, with no small measure of success gained over the last decade.  “Even though it has lost Osama bin Laden and its safe haven in Afghanistan,” the author writes, al Qaeda’s “fight against America is broader, and al Qaeda and its affiliates are key players in more regions than they were engaged in a decade ago…Meanwhile, the U.S. economy is shattered, it faces an almost unthinkable debt burden, and its policy makers have largely been consigned to arguing with each other on the sidelines while the country’s traditional allies…are overthrown or see their power erode” (p. 200).

Read More →

TEN YEARS HAVE passed since terrorists hijacked airliners and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  In that period, America has fought wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, carried out hundreds armed drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen (among other locations), and conducted covert operations around the world, all in the name of what President George W.  Bush termed the “Global War on Terror.”  Terror plots and attempted attacks have been foiled, terrorist leaders have been killed or captured in massive numbers – including the world’s most wanted terrorist himself, Osama bin Laden.  All of this has combined, in the words of President Barack Obama, to “put al Qaeda on the path to defeat.”

Given all this, is it possible that America is actually losing the war on terror? In Bin Laden’s Legacy: Why We’re Still Losing the War on Terror, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, argues not only that we are losing, but that we as a nation still fail to understand what kind of a war we are fighting, and what our enemies’ actual goals are.  This is a powerful indictment, and Gartenstein-Ross painstakingly lays it out in a book that is both sharply analytical and accessible to any audience.

A KEY PROBLEM with America’s attempt to wage a War on Terror while safeguarding itself from future attack, Gartenstein-Ross writes, is that our ignorance of the enemy we are facing has allowed us to pursue both goals in a profligate fashion that plays right into the hands of an enemy that sees America’s economy as the long-term target.  To understand the reasoning behind this, we must look to the Soviet Union.  Though myriad factors contributed to the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., its collapse so shortly after its withdrawal from a decade-long quagmire in Afghanistan helped convince Osama bin Laden and other former mujahedeen that they had been the cause of its ultimate defeat.

Now, al Qaeda has taken this strategy of embroiling a much larger and wealthier enemy in a long and costly war of economic attrition and has aimed it at the United States, with no small measure of success gained over the last decade.  “Even though it has lost Osama bin Laden and its safe haven in Afghanistan,” the author writes, al Qaeda’s “fight against America is broader, and al Qaeda and its affiliates are key players in more regions than they were engaged in a decade ago…Meanwhile, the U.S. economy is shattered, it faces an almost unthinkable debt burden, and its policy makers have largely been consigned to arguing with each other on the sidelines while the country’s traditional allies…are overthrown or see their power erode” (p. 200).

Read More →