OH NOES! Negotiating With the Taliban!!!1
In the course of a spittle-inflected Small Wars Journal diatribe against my friend Nir Rosen for the alleged moral failing of embedding with the Taliban, Atlantic correspondent Bing West — whose recent book I preliminarily praised in TWI — offers this bit of dubious moral outrage:
“„Having told the reader what his intent was, Rosen described the Taliban as “religious students who knew little about the rest of the world and cared only about liberating their country from oppressive warlords.” Rosen concluded his piece by declaring that the war was lost –- unless we negotiated an ending with the Taliban.
Yes, only simpletons could believe that negotiating with the Taliban offers more hope than an open-ended conflict. Such simpletons include Hamid Karzai, David Petraeus, the Pakistani government and, increasingly, the Pentagon.
Good thing we have West to keep us on the straight and narrow.
