What's It All About Stevie?

This week among the more salient news of military victory and winning Afghan hearts and minds comes news that NATO has given the nod to President Karzai's senior council making negotiations with the Taliban. Maybe not the bitter-ender Taliban but the middle managers who have been so much in the laser designators of USAF drones. Not only that, we're now being told that both the US army and the CAF have been instrumental in granting safe passes to Taliban who want to go negotiate in Kabul.

I would imagine that the safe pass would also include passage to and from Kabul.

One could imagine how that particular aspect of the battle would play out. PsyOps broadcasts and airdropped leaflets letting those mid-level guys know that the high command was selling them down the river in return for safe harbor and a gas station in Kabool. Some salient statements at local jurgas about a 'free all-expernse paid trip' to Kabul to meet with government officials for some free flashlights and sneakers. The 'bus' leaving in a military convoy running the 'Taliban' representatives up to the capital. The real head honchos transported by chopper.

What one couldn't imagine is those representatives and commanders being allowed to walk around free for long, or not accidentally falling off the bus or out of the chopper. For what warrior worth his 'ethos' wants to talk his way out of the Afghan turkey-shoot? This is the best military fun since Grenada,  only with far more latitude to shoot things and bomb stuff. When this is over there'll be a lot more CIBs on blouses than there were coming out of Iraq, and for relatively little cost.

Besides that, with all the talk of successful operations, the talk of negotiations just re-whets the suckers' appetities for victory, along with the weird notion that all the waste has been 'worth it'.

Sad to think that this is just more unadulterated horsepellets and that next year there'll be another 'slant' on the 'saga' of what some are planning to be  an intergenerational war. It's just as true that the Taliban  can't defeat NATO as it is that NATO can't stop the Taliban. It's also true that, like all gamblers, the taxpayers of the west hate to realize their losses by giving up the dice. Where there's life, or the expenditure of trillions, they say, there's hope.