The Taliban are not a legitimate faction to negotiate with.

Over the past year, the Obama administration has taken US foreign policy in a failed direction- that if we can reason with enemies like Iran and Al-Qaeda, and negotiate with the Taliban, we can settle our differences and end much of the conflict. While laudable, more educated and experienced people know better.

President Obama negotiations are failing too.  From the front page of the New York Times:

With the surge of American troops over and the Taliban still a potent threat, American generals and civilian officials acknowledge that they have all but written off what was once one of the cornerstones of their strategy to end the war here: battering the Taliban into a peace deal. . . . Now American officials say they have reduced their goals further — to patiently laying the groundwork for eventual peace talks after they leave. American officials say they hope that the Taliban will find the Afghan Army a more formidable adversary than they expect and be compelled, in the years after NATO withdraws, to come to terms with what they now dismiss as a “puppet” government.

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Negotiating with an unreasonable enemy will never bear fruit.

The attempted closing of Gitmo and withdrawal from Afghanistan was seen as an olive branch to these would be terrorists and enemies of free people everywhere. And what did it get us? Terrorism is on the rise again, and once again our freedoms are put at risk, at the effort of political expediency.

This country refuses to accept that there are people that are hell bent on destroying our way of life, simply because of our beliefs and economic system. They seek to wage both economic and violent war on this country for no other reason than we represent values that don’t sit well with them. This refusal to accept this, and to treat these enemies AS enemies, puts not only our lives at risk, but our freedoms.

Once again, the government, as it did under Bush and Clinton, seeks to find the middle ground in appeasing terrorism with half measures and the removal of our freedoms of travel through onerous security measures rather than man up to a horrible prospect- that the destruction of these groups and the governments that support them may be the only redress we have. That is a frightful prospect, and I understand their trepidation at using economic and military methods to destroy these enemies, but the longer we postpone the inevitable, the more violent and expensive the proposition will become.

Imagine if we had taken a policy of appeasement and containment with the Japanese in 1941. It certainly would not have ended well for America.

When the Shah’s regime fell in Iran, when terrorists murdered those innocent athletes in 1972, America should have realized that the danger was imminent. These were the warning signs that we must act boldly and quickly. In the light of our own economic hardships and fear of death, we postponed it. We talked and negotiated, we increased our security, and we put our own freedoms on a back burner to avoid the truth.

The truth is that our enemies will not go away on their own, and reasonable talk with a zealot is not feasible.

These are religious fanatics who blow up their own children to kill us, who hide their troops behind the skirts of women to wage war both militarily and in the public relations theatre in order to gain a foothold on our way of life.

But what do we do at this point? I wish I had an easy answer, but there isn’t one. For starters, with the prospect of a nuclear Iran looming on the horizon, we must shut them down economically. This means a full military blockade of their countries until they turn over Osama Bin Laden and eject Al-Qaeda from their countries of safety. If they refuse then more serious measures must be taken.

This is not a US problem either- this is a world problem, for their violence will eventually spread throughout the globe. The longer we delay, the more painful the cure will be.

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