Negotiating With The Taliban.

[garbon]

A couple of them are wanted by the UN for war crimes for alleged murder of thousands.  But they're just politicians, so we can let them go.

Uh... if the US cares about them being wanted by the UN for war crimes, why did you lock them up in Gitmo rather than hand them to a UN tribunal? It seems a bit weird to bring that up now...

Seems relevant when deciding whom to release.

[Jacob]

Seems relevant when deciding whom to release.

Also relevant when looking for reasons to be outraged.

[garbon]

Seems relevant when deciding whom to release.

Also relevant when looking for reasons to be outraged.

One has to be pretty tiresome to go looking about for reasons to be outraged.

At any rate, yeah, I'm not particularly outraged about this.

[Jacob]

One has to be pretty tiresome to go looking about for reasons to be outraged.

At any rate, yeah, I'm not particularly outraged about this.

on both counts

[derspiess]

I'm not losing sleep over it.  I just think it is starting to look like an embarrassing fuckup and I'm disappointed in the Administration.

[Admiral Yi]

When in doubt about the merits of your case, it does no harm to claim your opponents are overreacting.

[Jacob]

When in doubt about the merits of your case, it does no harm to claim your opponents are overreacting.

When people are overreacting, it does no harm to claim that they are overreacting.

[citizen k]

Does anyone think that the Pentagon and Intelligence officials were in favor of releasing these five Talibanistas from Gitmo? They were described as the worst of the worst.  Wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the UN and/or internationally.  Remember what the Taliban were doing when they were in power. Now they'll be free to do as they want within Qatar, living a life of luxury as martyrs. Later they'll be free to return to Afghanistan in a year (or less?) if they choose to and likely assume some of their leadership roles to bolster the Taliban.

Did Obama just swap five dangerous "terrorists" for Bergdahl, as Sen. Cruz alleges? It depends on your definition of "terrorism."

Four of the five men released into Qatar's custody, where they are supposed to remain for at least a year before being allowed to return home, were indeed senior members of the Taliban movement. The Taliban have been seeking the release of the five in exchange for Bergdahl since 2011, and there had been fitful progress in that regard, with Qatar acting as a mediator, since at least 2013.

Outgoing Afghan President Hamid Karzai has sought in recent years to find a reconciliation deal with the Taliban, and the release of the "Guantanamo Five" has been a part of those efforts.

Who are they? Khairullah Khairkhwa was governor of Herat during Taliban rule and is a founder of the group. Fazl Mazlum was head of their army. Nurullah Nuri was the Taliban's governor of Balkh province, and Abdul Haq Wasiq was the deputy head of Taliban intelligence. Mohammad Nabi Omeri is the most junior of the five, alleged by the US to have been the Taliban governments head of communications and has claimed that he had assisted the US in efforts to track down Mullah Omar, the titular head of the Taliban.

As best as can be made out, none of the released men were ever directly involved in efforts to mount terrorist attacks on the US or any other foreign country. Kate Clark, writing about the group for the Afghan Analysts Network in 2013, said that while accusations of war crimes against the men have been common in US press reports, evidence is scant.

    Objections to their release appear based less on practical considerations, than on political ones, especially fears in the White House of being accused of dealing  with the enemy during an election year

    It seems important, therefore, to be honest about the allegations made about the five. All or some of the five have been labelled in press reports as war criminals, but without giving details of where, when and against whom the crimes supposedly took place. There is only real evidence against Mullah Fazl Mazlum and the allegations against him were known about at the time – that he had command responsibility when civilians were massacred and civilian property willfully destroyed. Many figures in government today have similar records. As will be looked at in depth in a second blog, claims made in the Guantanamo Bay tribunals and in press reports sourced to unnamed US officials, frequently do not stand up to close inspection.

There's also the concern that the arrest of some of these men actually contributed to the raging insurgency in Afghanistan. Clark writes: "At least one of the five, the former deputy intelligence chief, Abdul Haq Wasiq, was arrested in 2001 by the US army in a sting operation after he had handed himself in to the new Afghan government in good faith. This was one of many such detentions of major Taleban figures involving deception or duplicity in the early months of the US intervention... It was a tactic which helped sow the seeds of insurgency, in that it showed that Taleban would not be allowed to live in peace after the fall of their regime."

Anand Gopal dealt with this problem at length in a 2010 report for the New America Foundation, in which he argued that overtures from a group of senior Taliban commanders to surrender in exchange for freedom and getting out of politics were spurned as a combination of hubris, revenge-seeking by Afghan enemies, and US insistence that the Taliban should not be dealt with.

    Karzai and other government officials ignored the overtures—largely due to pressures from the United States and the Northern Alliance, the Taliban's erstwhile enemy. Moreover, some Pashtun commanders who had been ousted by the Taliban seven years earlier were eager for revenge and were opposed to allowing former Taliban officials to go unpunished.

    Widespread intimidation and harassment of these former Taliban ensued. Sympathetic figures in the government told Haqqani and others in the group that they should flee the country, for they would not be safe in Afghanistan. So the men eventually vanished across the border into Pakistan's Baluchistan province. Many of the signatories of the letter were to become leading figures in the insurgency.

Clark wrote of Khairkhwa that "during the Emirate, he was considered one of the more moderate Taleban in leadership circles" and she recounted meeting the man in September 2000. "Unlike many Taleban, he was comfortable speaking to a foreigner and, very unusually, happy to be interviewed in Persian (most Taleban would only speak Pashto at the time). Herat, where he was the governor, was noticeably more relaxed than Kabul, Mazar or Kandahar: I filmed openly in the city (then an illegal act), the economy was reasonably buoyant and women came up to chat – a very rare occurrence."

Fazl is probably the pick of the bunch when it comes to nastiness. In 1999 he was in charge of Taliban forces who participated in a scorched earth campaign in Shomali, with vast destruction of homes and orchards and the execution of civilians and captured Northern Alliance combatants. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans were displaced in that campaign.

Others in the group have been accused, without evidence, of having participated in massacres during the Afghan civil war that ended in Taliban victory. It seems a safe bet that these are not nice men.

But neither are many of the warlords the US and NATO helped bring to power in Afghanistan. Consider Abdul Rashid Dostum, who has served as army chief of staff under President Karzai. In 2001, as the US helped the Northern Alliance defeat the Taliban government, Dostum was credibly alleged to have been in command of troops that killed 2,000 Taliban detainees, some shot, most suffocated to death in shipping containers. That is not his only alleged crime, nor is he alone amongst the US and NATO's allies in the country. Human Rights Watch wrote in 2006:

    Several of the worst perpetrators from Afghanistan's recent past are still active and engaging in widespread human rights abuses. Several highly placed members of the current Afghan government and legislature were implicated in war crimes during brutal fighting that killed or displaced hundreds of thousands of Afghans in the early 1990s and precipitated the rise of the Taliban. Most prominent among this group are parliamentarians Abdul Rabb al Rasul Sayyaf, Mohammed Qasim Fahim and Burhanuddin Rabbani, Minister of Energy Ismail Khan, Army Chief of Staff Abdul Rashid Dostum, and current Vice President Karim Khalili, all of whom continue to misuse positions of power.

If allegations of war crimes during Afghanistan's civil war amounts to being a terrorist, then the US has been treating with terrorists in Afghanistan for 13 years now.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/Backchannels/2014/0601/Five-Taliban-released-for-Sgt.-Bergdahl-This-is-how-wars-end.-video

[Admiral Yi]

When people are overreacting, it does no harm to claim that they are overreacting.

When you see outrage when others dispassionately raise objections, you end up losing credibility.

[Valmy]

Dispassionately?  Anyway did you see the leftists objecting to Obama's unconstitutionality Yi?  Told you.

[Razgovory]

A couple of them are wanted by the UN for war crimes for alleged murder of thousands.  But they're just politicians, so we can let them go.

Uh... if the US cares about them being wanted by the UN for war crimes, why did you lock them up in Gitmo rather than hand them to a UN tribunal? It seems a bit weird to bring that up now...

Cause he doesn't give a shit about the UN nor do most Republicans.  If they did Congress would pay the dues to the UN.

[garbon]

A couple of them are wanted by the UN for war crimes for alleged murder of thousands.  But they're just politicians, so we can let them go.

Uh... if the US cares about them being wanted by the UN for war crimes, why did you lock them up in Gitmo rather than hand them to a UN tribunal? It seems a bit weird to bring that up now...

Cause he doesn't give a shit about the UN nor do most Republicans.  If they did Congress would pay the dues to the UN.

Most people don't feel that way about the UN?

[Admiral Yi]

Dispassionately?  Anyway did you see the leftists objecting to Obama's unconstitutionality Yi?  Told you.

I really don't know what point you're making.  i was talking about Jacob describing Grabon and Speiss' reaction as "outrage."

[derspiess]

Cause he doesn't give a shit about the UN

  What makes you say that?  I participated in the 1989 Odd Fellows UN Pilgrimage, which helped steer me toward pursuing a degree in International Relations.  As an Odd Fellow today I am active in helping today's high school students visit and learn about this vital international organization.

[Eddie Teach]

You don't strike me as being particularly odd. Republican suburban family man who enjoys watching sports and maybe plays the occasional war game?