Is it time to open a dialogue with the Taliban?

Let’s try leaving their country….than see what happens.

Yes, lets leave and go home

In these talks, what do we say? What do we want? What comes after “So…. Hi?”

I am torn on this. On the one hand, it would be essentially giving in to terrorists, but on the other hand, our current approach is not working. At all.
What should be done is depriving them of their “income”, by decreasing poverty among the countries that they reside in. That includes massive investment in developing infrastructure, education, economy, social safety nets, etc. We would have to bypass the corrupt governments for that, however. If they can not recruit more members, they will eventually perish, or at least be pushed into a position of irrelevance.

or you could do as the commenters on fox news say, and nuke mecca and exterminate muslims by unleashing clones of hitler, stalin and pol pot on them (that was really written on there)

I hate to say it, but I really do think that “open dialogue” and “with the Taliban” don’t go well in the same sentence.

Open dialog with talibans? And after we could, you know, have a hot nice shower on the clouds.

OK, bad analogy. Sorry. But you got my point.

You shouldn’t be invading countries for such lame excuses, though :).

I wish.

“Hi, I’m from the Taliban and I’m here to help you. Lol. Hahaha. Joking.”

All we have brought to Afghanistan is bombs and bullets. We could have done a lot better than that. If we are not going to help the country we might as well get out and that means talking.

What I am about to say is not going to be taken well but bear with me. What if the Taliban was not responsible for 911 and we are over there tearing up their country. How would you as a citizen of Afghanistan feel about that? Osama Bin Laden sent 3 different tapes saying that he and the Taliban were not responsible. It was only when the American’s “Found” a tape in Afghanistan that a image looking like Bin Laden said that he was responsible. I know most everyone will disagree and that is okay because the news media and the government are powerful persuaders and most of the Americans rely on the news media.

@Summum They would still be an oppressive government committing great crimes against their people and supplying tons of heroin for the world.

@MyNewtBoobs True so is it okay that America gets into every country that does that and police the world?

@Summum I didn’t say that. I implied that it probably wouldn’t change much.

I say we stop what we’re doing altogether and instead spend trillions of dollars on inventing a time machine to bring us back to before we invaded Afghanistan. Then, I say we just decide to not invade in the first place.

Hold on. As I understand it, we’re already open to talking to the Taliban—and indeed have talked to the Taliban—since at least last year.

Of course, one of the Taliban members we were negotiating with turned out to be an impostor. In general, the Taliban doesn’t seem too open to negotiating.

Anyway, the Taliban are not equivalent to al-Qaeda; much of the Taliban is a loosely organized local insurgent group that is mostly fighting because they don’t like foreigners on their land.

They are also brutal and would no doubt seek to impose misogynistic Islamic law, and have for years assassinated any Afghans they can find who cooperate with NATO. So we shouldn’t have any illusions about who we’re dealing with. But at the same time, local guerilla insurgencies aren’t really ever defeated militarily, at least not without civilian casualties orders of magnitude beyond what we’ve already inflicted on this country.

@Disc2021, here is the problem I have with just suddenly pulling out, as if we could pretend the 9-year invasion and occupation never happened: we ruined their country.

I don’t want to be in Afghanistan just to “win” against the enemy or whatever, but I do think Americans bear moral—and financial—responsibility for rebuilding the country we ruined through a long-mismanaged war.

I think Obama’s strategy and ROE admirably moves the war closer towards “police action,” and we have succeeded in killing less civilians. Unfortunately, we still kill too many civilians… and the Taliban have killed many more civilians since the new strategy took effect.

In any case, even if we agree that we should try to rebuild the country, we can’t—and shouldn’t—occupy it in the long term.

There’s probably no negotiating with them. They’re nuts, probably largely suffering from the same kinds of delusions as cretins like Glenn Beck. The best that can be done is to isolate them.

Or, of course, you can be a moron and think giving them weapons is a good idea and will have no consequences later.

1) We should get out of there for we are not accomplishing any real positive results
2) Negotiating with them is not an option for us and is something against their ideology.
3) Is better to isolate them once they start becoming a fascist and cruel government with their own people. Similar to what is happening to Libya now, without international trade and support of any kind. Any government without international support will succumb in a matter of months and the people in that country will rebel against their authorities creating an internal fight that can easily overthrow whoever is in power. Sure, Afghanistan is a different situation for the Taliban are completely nuts, but things will change of the will of the fight comes from their own people rather from outside forces.

We don’t negotiate, with violently Homophobic, sexist, ultra extreme, ultra intolerant religious nut jobs, no, as far as i’m concerned, dialogue with the Tea Party is out of the question, but offering the olive branch to the Taliban could bear fruit. Professor Johan Gultang explains several important grievances that the Taliban have with the West particularly America and visa versa, both parties grievances need to be attended to and considered legitimate or unreasonable, for example, the Taliban are against secularisation, that is considered reasonable, but enshrined misogyny and female repression isn’t, America wants an end to terrorism fomented in Afghanistan against them, that is legitimate, they also want to construct this notorious oil pipeline and manage it, that is illegitimate and so forth…..anyway watch the video , it is very sensible. BTW holding Afghanistan responsible for the 9/11 attacks is overkill.

@Qingu I agree with you. You also beg the question of how exactly we go about rebuilding the country. I feel like no matter how much we win in Afghanistan, we still lose.

That’s why I say we build ourselves a time machine.

But the Taliban have such extremist views

Cant find my previous answer must have upset a liberal or two, ok heres my short answer, HELL NO!

I am torn on this too. “Moderate” Taliban might keep the promise not to reopen terror training camps for Al-Qaeda. But they will still implement a despicable totalitarian system denying education and jobs to girls and women and forcing them to run around in dehumanizing mobile prisons as faceless and powerless creatures. Non-militant Islamism is the breeding group for militant Islamism.

A second issue is this: modern Afghans rejecting the Taliban and working with ISAF right now will be in serious danger when the Taliban regain power. Can we really let them down?

There are probably no moderates in the Taliban leadership. Some of the grunts may be more of the mentality that they’re defending their homes and all they know, of course – they could in theory be reachable if westerners had better PR.