In Afghanistan, President Karzai isn’t happy about the US-Taliban talks announced in Qatar yesterday.
What he wants is a renunciation of violence, a recognition of the Afghan constitution, and direct talks with the Taliban.
What he doesn’t seem to understand is that without the US, his government and mostly likely he himself won’t last 6 months once US forces have departed.
Our President seems to be playing this one about right. We should have departed Afghanistan a decade ago. What we’ve created there is a corrupt government that is unable to control much of the country.
So we’re doing the best we can to get out. We’d like a peaceful solution, but there’s not a lot we can do to make that happen.
The same principle applies to Syria.
We’d rather not see a bloodbath, but we have no great national security interests there and there is not much we can do to change the situation on the ground.
Arming the rebels is not a solution, since the rebels are not a unified force and the Russians, knowing they’ll be the biggest loser is Assad goes, don’t want to play ball.
What this demonstrates is there are limits to American power.
Spending 10 times more than anybody else on the military has not bought us anything of lasting value in the past 25 years.
It’s time to recognize we can’t do it all by ourselves and we need to fix our own broken society as soon as possible.
Gorilla says: “Let’s put people back to work to build something more useful than endless, pointless wars!!!”
