Is The End In Sight In Afghanistan?

Let’s hope so.

There have been quiet negotiations going on for a long time but they are usually kept quiet because a) there is the persistent notion that leaving will equal losing (as if we aren’t) and b) the negotiations include the hated Taliban. Trump talked about getting us out and it seems like it might be getting closer to happening. From the L.A. Times:

Column: Trump’s draft deal with the Taliban looks ugly, but it may be the best we can get

You may not have noticed, but the Trump administration is racing to reach a peace agreement with the Taliban, the Islamic militants who once sheltered terrorist leader Osama b in Laden in Afghanistan and have been battling U.S. troops since 2001.

As the latest round of closed-door talks wraps up in Qatar, a potential deal appears in sight — and it doesn’t look pretty.

By all accounts, the current draft includes the withdrawal of about 5,400 U.S. troops in exchange for a Taliban pledge to cut ties with Al Qaeda. It doesn’t require the fundamentalists to support democratic elections or guarantee the hard-won rights of Afghan girls and women.
—-
After 18 years, more than 2,400 U.S. military dead and 20,000 wounded (plus more than 1,100 NATO troops killed), the Taliban appears to have outlasted us.

This is how this was always going to end. We leave and the Afghans go back to being Afghans. You can’t change the fundamental nature of people by pointing a gun at them. The Taliban, like the mujaheddin before them and the Vietnamese before that, can always outlast a soft Western power because they don’t care about casualties. 100 dead Taliban fighters means 100 of them going to their paradise. 1 dead American solider is all over the news in the U.S..

At this point I don’t care if Afghani girls can go to school or not. We can’t even get our own border under control, we can’t force western democracy on a Stone Age people and even one more American death is too many.

It is a decade past time to get out of there.