Taliban wins in Afghan election — VOICES for REASON

It’s sad, but true: the Afghan election is a macabre sideshow. The chatter about voter turnout is beside the point. The country is in flames. What’s needed is to defeat the Taliban, once and for all, by military means–a goal that Washington has given up on: See Barack Obama’s admission on this point. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander there, believes the outlook is horrendous. Summing up his view, the WSJ headlined its story: “Taliban Now Winning.” And things are getting worse. Depressingly, Washington has reconciled itself to allowing the Taliban to remain a major force in the region.

So have politicians in Afghanistan.

Whether and how to negotiate peace with the Taliban has become the one issue that no candidate in the Afghan presidential election can avoid taking a stand on. There is broad agreement that the war must end, but debate swirls around whether the government of President Hamid Karzai is moving effectively toward persuading the Taliban to end their insurgency.

The story goes on to describe what Karzai has pledged to do to appease the Taliban (like hold tribal councils to negotiate peace with the Taliban).What do the candidates challenging him plan to do? The three significant ones, reports the NYT, differ only on “how to pursue a settlement: by negotiating a comprehensive peace with the Taliban leadership; or by trying to draw away midlevel Taliban commanders and foot soldiers, an approach that has been tried with little success over the past seven years as the ranks of fighters have swelled.”

For what it means to seek a negotiated peace with the Taliban, glance across the border at Pakistan. Its policy has been to appease the Taliban and allied Islamist groups. The result: they have moved by force of arms to expand their dominion across Pakistan (an issue I’ve discussed in several posts.)

It’s sad, but true: the focus on how the Afghan elections will play out is a way of evading the humiliating reality of how we’re allowing the Taliban to win.