Obama's Servile Negotiations With the Taliban Over Afghanistan

Obama's Servile Negotiations With the Taliban Over Afghanistan
by Tara Servatius
06/05/2011

Most Americans don’t realize how far President Obama has bowed down to the Taliban–and how he is potentially setting them up to rule Afghanistan.

While the fact that we are negotiating with the Taliban has been fleetingly covered here in America, a search using LexisNexis shows that the rest of the story about the concessions we have offered them has been virtually blacked out by the mainstream media in the U.S. Things are so bad that we now aren’t even requiring that they renounce their ties to al-Qaeda before we negotiate with them.

You’d have to read British newspapers to learn that, and about how they have humiliated our President and British Prime Minister David Cameron on the national stage in negotiations.

The Obama administration is so desperate to appease the Islamic savages and cut a peace deal with them that U.S. negotiators no longer require preconditions of Taliban fighters we negotiate with—like that they halt the killing of innocent civilians and our troops or break with al-Qaeda, the Telegraph of London reported.

Apparently, terrorist attacks on U.S. soil aren’t off-limits either. Incredibly, these “negotiations” with the Taliban began last fall, just five months after the attempted Times Square bombing attack by Faisal Shahzad, which was funded by the Taliban.

U.S. negotiators and their British counterparts aren’t even requiring that the Taliban embrace the Afghan constitution that our troops and many Afghans paid for with blood. Worse yet, they are aiming to turn control of the county at least partly over to the Taliban in a “shared power” deal, essentially throwing the Afghan people to the wolves.

Meanwhile our troops take bullets enforcing the Afghan constitution and continue to die fighting for what the Obama administration is giving away at the negotiating table. The Taliban killed four U.S. soldiers and 42 innocent civilians in bombings at hospital and construction sites this month, and was recently caught attempting to smuggle suicide bombers as young as 9 years old into the country.

If the American public got the full story on this, they’d be outraged. The Taliban is so emboldened that it has even demanded we release 20 prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay holding facility as part of negotiations, one of the few details of these talks that has actually been reported by the U.S. press.

Then last week the Taliban humiliated Obama and Cameron during their European summit on Afghanistan. Despite our over- the-top concessions, upper-level Taliban leaders refused to show up at highly publicized “peace” talks in Germany after deciding they didn’t want to, well, talk. (Talks thus far have been with mid-level leaders.) News that the Taliban jilted Obama at the negotiating table filled European papers just as Obama’s entourage hit the continent.

The way the Taliban leaders see it, the Telegraph reports, “They can simply sit it out and wait for victory in 2014,” when troops are scheduled to exit.

Taliban leaders have been openly baffled by the Obama administration’s determination to negotiate peace with them from the beginning.

An aide to Taliban leader Mullah Omar explained the group’s position in November: “All of these reports of peace talks are nonsense,” Mullah Aminullah told NBC News.“This is just propaganda by the U.S. and its NATO allies to hide their defeat on the battlefield. We are winning, why should we negotiate?”

The Taliban has been laughing since Secretary of State Hillary Clinton first proposed negotiating with the “moderate” members of the Taliban in 2009.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid called this a “lunatic idea,” insisting that there were no moderate Taliban.

“They have to go and find the moderate Taliban, their leader, and speak to them,” he told Reuters.

It’s baffling as well to many British observers why we would want or need a make a deal with the Taliban at all as part of exiting Afghanistan.

"British and U.S. strategy should be about containing terrorism, not brokering a final peace,” Tory Member of Parliament Rory Stewart told the paper.

Still Obama and Cameron plow ahead, pushing for what the British papers call a “political solution.” By that they mean one that will make Obama look great … to America’s enemies.