"President Obama Should Negotiate with the Taliban" by William K. Barth [View All]

[StarfarerBill]

"Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate."
~ John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Presidential Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961.

"Americans oppose insurgency - so much so that President Obama's Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, has testified before Congress that the administration plans to send 33,000 more American troops and spend an additional $100 billion in Afghanistan. All this to continue a war against insurgent Taliban forces battling the regime of President Hamid Karzai, which is not only widely regarded as being extremely corrupt, but has also been implicated in heroin-trafficking. This should give us pause to re-examine our opposition to the Taliban, as well as to insurgency broadly defined.

"Our anti-insurgency bias is not consistent with our history. The United States was established, in large part, through the actions of insurgent minutemen against King George III's British troops. Even though European colonialism has long since ended, insurgents still continue their battles to eradicate colonialism's legacy. Insurgency is also used by indigenous populations in order to gain self-governance in regions still controlled by states unsympathetic to local political aspirations. It is difficult to understand why Americans should oppose such movements in principle, given that self-determination is jus cogens (universally recognized) as a tenet of international law. Indeed, this principle was first established by President Woodrow Wilson, and the League of Nations, at the conclusion of WWI, in the hope of ending the use of war as a tool to achieve national aspirations."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-barth/president-obama-should-ne_b_391870.html