Reply #6: Things Things Need A More General Spread To Work Properly, Ma'am [View All]

[The Magistrate]

Afghanistan faced then, and for that matter faces now, several very pressing problems, chiefly rebuilding homes, establishing communications infrastructure, and the predominance of private tribal armies over national forces. All of these are susceptible to money. The private armies pay their men, and while it is not much, it pays better than farming by a long sight. If government sponsored construction work payed twice what the private armies can pay, and service in the national army paid four times what private army service paid, the private armies would melt away, to their merest cores of kinship among bandits.

My inclination was, and is, to completely disregard the reported 'overtures' of the Taliban leadership in September on those lines. There is not the slightest reason to suspect they were sincere, and every reason to believe they were mere posturings for propaganda and to perhaps delay the inevitable a little longer. It is a pretty standard move, after all. Once the jet-lines struck the buildings, there really was no other course events could have taken in regard to the country in which that operation was based. Ghandi himself, were he President of the United States at that time, would have had to give the order for attack, if he wished to renain in office: the people here would not have stood for anything short of it.