Negotiating With An Atrocity-Loving Barbarian Brigade

"In the last ten days we've killed over one thousand Taliban."
"If you're the Taliban, conditions have been worsening -- and they're about to get worse."
"No one should underestimate President Trump's commitment to achieving those military goals [he's set out to accomplish]."
U.S.Secretary of State Mike Pompeo

"[The move to walk away from 'peace' talks with the Taliban] will harm America more than anyone else."
"It will damage its reputation, unmask its anti-peace policy to the world even more, increase its loss of life and treasure, and present its political interactions as erratic."
Taliban response

What!? The Trump administration erratic? That statement of actual fact may represent the sole true statement ever uttered by a Taliban spokesperson. The greater reality is that the vicious Islamist entity that is the jihadist fundamentalist Taliban never entertained an iota of an intention to bargain for peace. Their bargain was to persuade the United States that its instinct expressed by U.S. President Donald Trump to evacuate American troops from Afghanistan is a safe and sane aspiration intended to end 18 years of struggle to help Afghanistan become a stable, functioning state capable of fending off the Taliban.

Donald Trump's off-again, on-again, vacillating and uncertain determination of the route to take was led by a seasoned warrior against extremism in his role as national security adviser, steering Trump away from trusting the Taliban. John Bolton held no illusions about the Taliban, just as he knows with intimate certainty the true measure of Islamist duplicity, hatred, threats and violence and that the way to counter that threat is to break its lethal hold on conscripting new recruits into the ideology of death deliverance.

That President Trump called off the negotiations with the Taliban, citing their continued and ongoing  and latest bombing attacks against civilian targets (and just incidentally killing an American solider) to spread fear and intimidation to aid their ambitions of conquest, would have been due to John Bolton's urging. It has been this man who has expressed unease and rejection of his president's conciliatory attitude toward formidable enemy forces of brutal ideological-religious campaigns for supremacy.

An Army carry team moves a transfer case containing the remains of Sgt. 1st Class Elis Barreto Ortiz, 34, from Morovis, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Sept. 7, 2019, at Dover Air Force Base, Del. According to the Department of Defense, Ortiz was killed in action Sept. 5, when a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle in Kabul, Afghanistan. Ortiz was supporting Operation Freedom's Sentinel. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)

The Taliban's immediate goal was to have NATO and American troops withdrawn to give them a clear field of operation, without the presence of a military competent enough to restrain their intentions of once again installing themselves through violent militant action to regain control of the country. The Taliban insistence that it would negotiate with the U.S. emissary Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, and not the government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani speaks to its commitment.

American envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, the lead negotiator in Doha with the Taliban, had already announced the finalized deal "in principle", which would lead to American troops being withdrawn. It was at that juncture that the president invited the Taliban and the Afghan government to attend a meeting at Camp David, hoping to seal the deal and produce a triumphant announcement, somewhat like, one might assume, producing a photograph similar to that of then-president Clinton, standing by with an avuncular smile as then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the PLO's Chairman Yasser Arafat shook hands. Resolving precisely nothing.

Resolute Support (RS) forces guard at the site of a car bomb explosion in Kabul, Afghanistan, Thursday, Sept. 5, 2019. The Afghan government says at least 10 civilians are dead and another 42 wounded after a Taliban suicide car bombing rocked the Afghan capital near a neighborhood housing the U.S. Embassy and the NATO Resolute Support mission. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)