We Started the Fire
April 8th, 2007Not sure I can blame Karzai, here.
President Hamid Karzai acknowledged for the first time Friday he has met with Taliban militants in attempts to bring peace to Afghanistan, which is struggling to quell a rising insurgency. Karzai’s assertion immediately rejected as false by a Taliban spokesman came as a suicide car bomber killed four people and wounded four others in Kabul, and militants overran a district in the volatile southeast. In the past, Karzai has offered, without success, to hold talks with the fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Omar and renegade warlord Gulbudin Hekmatyar. Some officials in his government, including provincial governors, are thought to have held informal talks with militants in the south and east, but with little apparent success to calm the insurgency.
“We have had representatives from the Taliban meeting with different bodies of Afghan government for a long time,” Karzai told a news conference. “I have had some Taliban coming to speak to me as well.” …Hundreds of former members of the hard-line Taliban regime, including a sprinkling of former senior commanders and officials, have reconciled with the government since they were ousted from power in the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. Current rebel leaders have apparently refused to hold talks, and in the past year, thousands more fighters have picked up guns and joined the insurgency, which in 2006 alone left some 4,000 people, mainly militants, dead.
Zabiullah Mujaheed, a purported spokesman for the militants, said that Taliban “do not want to talk to a puppet government.” “Karzai’s government has no power and all their policies are designed by America,” Mujaheed told The Associated Press by phone from an undisclosed location. “If the U.S. wants to negotiate with the Taliban, they should first leave our country.”
We’ve dropped the ball in Iraqhistan — in the War on Terror. Everybody knows it, and this is just a result. If we’d done what we were supposed to do, and that is fight our wars as if we genuinely meant to fight them, the opium trade in Afghanistan wouldn’t have revived and exploded and the Taliban wouldn’t still be fighting after more than five years.
Guess that ends our boasting that we accomplished in “one month” what the Russians and the British couldn’t in a year.
On the other front of our War on Terror, there’s terrible news. Namely: that terrorists are getting crafty in Iraq, and that’s a thought that should terrify every American that cares about our troops and Iraqi civilians.
A suicide truck bomb loaded with chlorine gas exploded in Ramadi on Friday, killing as many as 30 people, many of them children, a security official said. The explosion burned victims’ lungs, eyes and skin. Dr. Ali Abdullah Saleh, of the main Ramadi hospital, said 30 people had been admitted with shrapnel wounds and 15 had been sent to a second hospital in the city. He said 50 people had been admitted for breathing problems. It was at least the sixth chlorine bomb detonated in Anbar Province since late January and the most lethal, though it appears that most victims were killed by the explosion rather than the chlorine. Insurgents have also used chlorine bombs in the northern part of Baghdad, the capital, and near Taji, a town just north of here.
The attacker in Ramadi struck in the late morning of the Muslim day of prayer, when children off from school usually play in the street and adults run errands and visit before going to the mosque at midday. The truck, a fuel tanker loaded with the toxic gas, sped toward an Iraqi police checkpoint, according to witnesses and Col. Tareq al-Dulaimi, the head of security for Anbar Province. The police officers opened fire and the truck swerved toward a residential area, where the bomb exploded, he said.
Once the terrorists start the utilize chlorine and elements of the sort, they’ll possess deadly weapons that they can use anywhere at any time with great effectiveness. Makes me wonder why our homeland hasn’t been struck since 9/11 with such a weapon.