Though the finishing touches are still being put on it, a new peace plan being pushed by the Karzai government aims to bring the Taliban into the political process by effectively ceding several provinces to them.
The plan envisions a ceasefire coming into place by 2015, and would grant the Taliban all top provincial government positions in several provinces, the ones that the Taliban already retains considerable de facto control over, in return for the ceasefire.
The hope is to limit US authority over the ongoing reconciliation process while trying to bring Pakistan onto the same side as the Karzai government in settling the ongoing war, something which would’ve been much easier had Karzai not continues to blame Pakistan for so many of his problems.
How stable this settlement would be is also a concern, as setting up a formal autonomous region for the Taliban would seemingly set the stage for the same sort of territorial conflicts Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan are constantly facing.
10 years, trillions of dollars, uncounted lives(literally no one is counting)
but finally we have succeeded in standing up organizing and arming a new Taliban government, Success!
wait wat….
Does anybody have a rough map of where Talibanistan begins and Afghanistan ends under this plan? Neither linked article does.
I guess they figured that it doesn't matter … I tend to agree . The mere fact that it is being contemplated is a show of how weak / bad that war went .
Well, it's a step forward. Now if we could just decide to leave the whole country to the Taliban and the rest of the folks actually living there we could save a bunch of money and lives.
This appears as an old ploy…partition. The 19th century British Raj used this tactic, the Soviets also used it, arming and allying with the minority Tajik and Uzbek factions or what was know then as the Shura-i-Nizar, now commonly known as the "Northern Alliance."
Those in this group that sided with the foreign interlopers, were and are collaborators, drug peddlers and guilty of war crimes. But hey, in the name of the "war on terror" and with ISAF anything or anyone that will work with them is acceptable. Partition will not work, it will set the stage for endless civil conflict and is contrary to democracy, that which we are trying to sell to the world as our goal.
This article shows that the U.S. has lost yet another war. Yet it is trying to dominate and control the world.
It is the laughing stock of the world! Its muscles are in its head!