© U.S. AIR NATIONAL GUARD / STAFF SGT. PATRICK EVENSONA U.S. B-52 Bomber sits on a flightline with munitions loaded on a newly installed conventional rotary launcher in its bomb bay, at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, Nov. 17, 2017.
Pummeling someone into reconciliation might seem like a curious strategy. But that's what the Trump administration is proposing to do to the Taliban as it seeks to bring an end to the war in Afghanistan.
"We will do everything we can to support the ANDSF fight against the Taliban
in order to drive them to the negotiating table," Randall Schriver, the assistant secretary of defense,
said Tuesday to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, referring to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces. "Fundamentally,
our goal is to convince the Taliban's senior leadership that its goals are better pursued through political negotiation rather than violence." Put another way, as Brigadier General Lance Bunch, who heads the the air campaign in Afghanistan,
did in an interview with
Defense One: "This is all part of our overarching strategy to continue to put pressure on the Taliban until they realize they've basically got a binary choice:
They can negotiate and reconcile, or live in irrelevance and die. We'll continue to go until the Taliban reconcile."
President Trump, as part of his strategy for the longest U.S. war, has reluctantly sent more Americans to Afghanistan.
There are now 14,000 U.S. troops in the country, with plans to send another 1,000. At the height of the war on terrorism, there were about 100,000 U.S. troops in the country. Since that time, the Taliban has re-emerged as a potent force. It now controls about one-third of Afghanistan, more territory than at any point since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001.
Comment: Anecdotally. But if everyone's honest with themselves, then we don't want drug-free sports; we want drug-fuelled sports. Because that's what we currently have.
That's also why it's doubly useful to bash Russia for doing it - we get to exculpate ourselves, or at least imagine that we are.