America Prepares to Surrender to the Taliban

After months of negotiations, the U.S. seems prepared to come to an agreement with the Taliban, according to which Washington will remove its troops from Afghanistan while the Taliban will agree to share power with the country’s current government and provide assurances that it will cease allying with terrorist groups and instead become a partner in combating jihadists. Andrew C. McCarthy comments:

The Taliban will soon be ruling Afghanistan again, just as it did in those years before 9/11. That is when al-Qaeda was encouraged to make Afghanistan the headquarters of its global anti-American jihad. In recent years, while we were fixated on Islamic State, al-Qaeda became stronger, more resilient, and more battle-hardened. When the Taliban retakes control, al-Qaeda will be right back in business. Lest we forget, its business is killing Americans.

American forces have been deployed in Afghanistan for eighteen years. It may seem like an endless mission because of the half-hearted, ill-conceived way it has been executed. But is it an “endless war”—to borrow President Trump’s worst hyperbole (which is saying something)? If it is, that is only because our enemies have never stopped being at war with us, and we have never resolved to defeat them. . . .

Al-Qaeda remains closely aligned with both Taliban leadership and the most important Taliban elements—such as the [Pakistani terrorist groups] Haqqani network and Lashkar-e-Taiba. At the same time, unsurprisingly, the Taliban continues to terrorize, and to deny the legitimacy of, the rickety, U.S.-backed government in Kabul—whose days are numbered once U.S. forces exit.

Bluntly, by pulling out of Afghanistan at this moment, we are enabling re-creation of the conditions that obtained circa 1998 through 2001. That is when al-Qaeda repeatedly mass-murdered Americans, attacking our embassies in eastern Africa, our naval destroyer Cole, and, ultimately, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

[The truth is], it is easy to end an endless war. . . . All you have to do is surrender.

Read more at National Review

More about: Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Donald Trump, Taliban, U.S. Foreign policy, War on Terror

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF