{"id":175915,"date":"2020-10-25T19:04:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-26T00:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/10\/25\/this-is-not-the-mark-of-a-winning-foreign-policy\/"},"modified":"2020-10-25T19:04:00","modified_gmt":"2020-10-26T00:04:00","slug":"this-is-not-the-mark-of-a-winning-foreign-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/10\/25\/this-is-not-the-mark-of-a-winning-foreign-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"This is Not the Mark of a Winning Foreign Policy"},"content":{"rendered":"

That the US is supporting the Taliban in its fight against Isis in Afghanistan<\/a> indicates that it’s not a particularly coherent foreign policy either. <\/p>\n

This is a direct consequence of our regime change Mousketeers misguided attempt at the overthrow of the Assads in Syria.<\/p>\n

The Council on Foreign Relations crowd have absolutely no concept of blowback, despite our being the recipient of this phenomenon over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again:<\/p>\n

Army Sgt. 1st Class Steve Frye was stuck on base last summer in Afghanistan, bored and fiddling around on a military network, when he came across live video footage of a battle in the Korengal Valley, where he had first seen combat 13 years earlier. It was infamous terrain, where at least 40 U.S. troops had died over the years, including some of Frye\u2019s friends. Watching the Reaper drone footage closely, he saw that no American forces were involved in the fighting, and none from the Afghan government. Instead, the Taliban and the Islamic State were duking it out. Frye looked for confirmation online. Sure enough, America\u2019s old enemy and its newer one were posting photos and video to propaganda channels as they tussled for control of the Korengal and its lucrative timber business. <\/span><\/p>\n

What Frye didn\u2019t know was that U.S. Special Operations forces were preparing to intervene in the fighting in Konar province in eastern Afghanistan \u2014 not by attacking both sides, but by using strikes from drones and other aircraft to help the Taliban. \u201cWhat we\u2019re doing with the strikes against ISIS is helping the Taliban move,\u201d a member of the elite Joint Special Operations Command counterterrorism task force based at Bagram air base explained to me earlier this year, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the assistance was secret. The air power would give them an advantage by keeping the enemy pinned down. <\/p>\n

Last fall and winter, as the JSOC task force was conducting the strikes, the Trump administration\u2019s public line was that it was hammering the Taliban \u201charder than they have ever been hit before,\u201d as the president put it<\/a> \u2014 trying to force the group back to the negotiating table in Doha, Qatar, after President Trump put peace talks<\/a> there on hold and canceled<\/a> a secretly planned summit with Taliban leaders at Camp David. Administration officials signaled that they didn\u2019t like or trust the Taliban and that, until it made more concessions, it could expect only blistering bombardment. <\/p>\n

In reality, even as its warplanes have struck the Taliban in other parts of Afghanistan, the U.S. military has been quietly helping the Taliban to weaken the Islamic State in its Konar stronghold and keep more of the country from falling into the hands of the group, which \u2014 unlike the Taliban \u2014 the United States views as an international terrorist organization with aspirations to strike America and Europe. Remarkably, it can do so without needing to communicate with the Taliban, by observing battle conditions and listening in on the group. Two members of the JSOC task force and another defense official described the assistance to me this year in interviews for a book about the war in Konar, all of them speaking on the condition of anonymity because they weren\u2019t authorized to talk about it. (The U.S. military headquarters in Afghanistan declined to comment for this story.)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As Rita May Brown (not Albert Einstein) said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That the US is supporting the Taliban in its fight against Isis in Afghanistan indicates that it’s not a particularly coherent foreign policy either.  This is a direct consequence of our regime change Mousketeers misguided attempt at the overthrow of the Assads in Syria. The Council on Foreign Relations crowd have absolutely no concept of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[467,588,394,589,406,377],"class_list":["post-175915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-afghanistan","tag-fail","tag-foreign-relations","tag-insane","tag-stupid","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175915"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175915\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}