President Obama is famously a basketball fan, preferring to watch games rather than TV talking heads during his weekend downtime. Now the country he leads is contemplating the notion of putting up a fadeaway jumper on its way to the Afghan exit:
The Obama administration is considering transferring to Afghan custody a senior Taliban official suspected of major human rights abuses as part of a long-shot bid to improve the prospects of a peace deal in Afghanistan, Reuters has learned.
The potential hand-over of Mohammed Fazl, a ‘high-risk detainee’ held at the Guantanamo Bay military prison since early 2002, has set off alarms on Capitol Hill and among some U.S. intelligence officials.
As a senior commander of the Taliban army, Fazl is alleged to be responsible for the killing of thousands of Afghanistan’s minority Shi’ite Muslims between 1998 and 2001…
Senior U.S. officials have said their 10-month-long effort to set up substantive negotiations between the weak government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the Taliban has reached a make-or-break moment. Reuters reported earlier this month that they are proposing an exchange of “confidence-building measures,” including the transfer of five detainees from Guantanamo and the establishment of a Taliban office outside of Afghanistan…
The detainees, the officials emphasized, would not be set free, but remain in some sort of further custody. It is unclear precisely what conditions they would be held under.
A talking shop in Dubai is one thing. Releasing a terrorist with the blood of thousands on his hands is another thing entirely. It can only be viewed by the Afghan Taliban as provocative weakness.
Already the Taliban have shifted fires, starting to focus their efforts on the Afghan national security forces upon whose slender shoulders lie hopes for a dignified withdrawal of foreign forces:
Ten members of a British-trained Afghan force were killed by a roadside bomb in the south of the country on Thursday, and an Afghan soldier in the east killed another soldier and two French sergeants, near the end of a year marked by violence reflecting a key shift in insurgent strategy.
With the attacks, the Taliban, who claimed responsibility, took aim at the central element of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization plan to pull out most foreign forces by the end of 2014: Training trustworthy Afghan security forces that can take on the job of protecting their own country.
This past year has seen the second-highest annual number of fatalities for foreign forces in Afghanistan since the war began 10 years ago. U.S. military fatalities, while dropping 17% from 2010, were much higher in 2011 than at any other time in the war. The number of Afghan civilian deaths continued to climb, according to recent United Nations statistics.
These then are those whom we are attempting to forge an agreement with through “confidence-building measures.”
Not even a long shot, it’s a moon shot with a blindfold, no slide rule, with your hands tied behind your back and standing with only your toes on the edge of the cliff…next comes the Wile E. Coyote freefall attitude, as once more, the Obamites fall off the cliff and are SHOCKED! at the outcome(s).
Sounds like, despite their 12th century education, the Taliban has a better strategy than we, with all our BlackBerrys and smarts and personal jets and cool military toys…we are rapidly turning a war to contain terror into a massive waster on blood and treasure, but that’s been said here before. We’re just getting closer to that resolution, much closer.
…as part of a long-shot bid to improve the prospects of a peace deal in Afghanistan……as part of a long shot to get hisself re-elected…, that’s more like it.Mohammed Fazl should have been executed years ago for war crimes. Our feckless elite have no clue what they are doing.
After reflection, maybe this is better. Put him back on the battlefield where our military can actually kill him!
Yup, let go from three hots, a cot and a koran to the wide open spaces in a slow moving Toyota caravan! Target acquired, cleared hot.
Followed by “BOOM! BOOM! OUT GO THE LIGHTS!”
Dual salvo authorized…of course, to meet Pk needs.
Sure, release him. From about 1000 ft, sans parachute.
You don’t need O2 to skydive below 15kft. With a normal deployment @ 2Kft, that’s about 1’15″ in FF. Toss in covering 1Kft at terminal (belly to earth) @ 6-7 sec per…so, about 12-14 seconds beyond where I was used to stopping the fun part and going for safety (and more jumps!).
I vote for a King Air ride to 15K, over water (no grave methodology, like OBL), so he has about 1.5′ to consider his like’s choices…1Kft…way too short of a time to get all the way to p1$$ing yourself a lot.
OT, but it is: Check out Olav Zipser’s Freefly Astronaut Project on FB. He’s the father of head down, and working on plans for astronauts getting back to earth, the funnest way, if there is a bad thing going on…
And he’s gonna jump out of a rocket to break Col. Joe Kittinger’s record!
Tell me again how many live prisoners the Taliban have released.
“Sounds like, despite their 12th century education, the Taliban has a better strategy than we, with all our BlackBerrys and smarts and personal jets and cool military toys…”
I would have said “better than we, with our Harvard law degrees and Columbia bachelors degrees…” but I’m not very subtle.
The hits just keep on comin’:
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2011/12/30/america-deserves-answers-on-the-obama-administrations-decision-to-outsource-the-next-generation-of-light-attack-aircraft/
Hawker is right to take the Zoomies to court over this.
Whoever is elected in November is going to inherit a foreign policy disaster. God, send us another Reagan.
Less subtle than me: +1000!
This will not end well. If we don’t get our shit together, we are so screwed.
We are, indeed, screwed. I think it’s far too late to pull this out.
Next time, no nation building, less ROE restrictions, no press, and no remorse. The ideal, Project Thor. They had their chance.
Like I used to say when mountaineering – Consider your future carefully.