will the real Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour please stand up

[FireGarden]

Another one that could go in the humour forum:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/world/asia/23kabul.html?_r=3

For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war appeared to be showing promise, if only because of the appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement.

But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little.

“It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”

Perhaps dumb, or dumb like a fox::

American officials say they were skeptical from the start about the identity of the man who claimed to be Mullah Mansour....

[...] Last month, White House officials asked The New York Times to withhold Mr. Mansour’s name from an article about the peace talks, expressing concern that the talks would be jeopardized — and Mr. Mansour’s life put at risk — if his involvement were publicized.

 

[Eddie Dane]

They gave him money to come to the peace talks?

Did they find him via an escort agency?

 

[bit_pattern]

pwned!

 

[Eddie Dane]

pwned!

Indeed.

This is a killer idea for Candid Camera, BTW.

 

[WildCat]

This does illustrate one of the problems of talking to the Taliban. How do we know who the leaders really are? Who, if anyone, has authority to speak for them?

 

[UWdude]

You cannot buy off, or defeat the taleban. the more you fight them, the more you recruit for them. The more you pay them not to fight, the more weapons they buy to fight you.

You cannot make peace with the taleban. They will only use the time to build weapons.

the taleban cannot be beat, because war and resistance is the way of life of the people of Afghanistan. It is ingrained in their culture and history. This to them is business as usual.

A very good look at how the taleban operates is here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/front...aign=viewpage&utm_medium=grid&utm_source=grid

The way frontline describes it, and the camera man witnessed as he lived with them for about 10 days, is they do nothing, until they get a report of some ISAF or Afghan police doing a patrol, and then they go out, and in rag tag fashion try to set bombs and kill them. It is comical, really, how untrained and unprofessional the taleban are, but they also are mostly fighting unprofessional, untrained, and unmotivated enemies.

 

[NoZed Avenger]

They . .pay to have Taliban leaders with no verification of authority show up for talks?!


If you'll excuse me, I have to go attend some meetings. It is time western negotiators meet Mullah Akbar John Bigbootey in person.

 

[WildCat]

You cannot buy off, or defeat the taleban.

The hell you can't. The entire history of Afghanistan is one of warring factions constantly switching sides in response to bribes/payoffs. Most of the Taliban fighters aren't ideologically aligned with them, they're fighting because they're getting paid off to fight for them.

As the saying goes "You can rent an Afghani, but you can't buy him".

 

[deepatrax]

You cannot buy off, or defeat the taleban. the more you fight them, the more you recruit for them. The more you pay them not to fight, the more weapons they buy to fight you.

You cannot make peace with the taleban. They will only use the time to build weapons.

the taleban cannot be beat, because war and resistance is the way of life of the people of Afghanistan. It is ingrained in their culture and history. This to them is business as usual.

You can beat the Taliban...

Remove all U.S and Nato forces from Afghanistan.

allow time to pass for the Taliban to gather, build it's headquarters, etc.

Pick a day next year, and bomb the **** out of Afghanistan.

allow time to pass for the Taliban to gather, build it's headquarters, etc.

Pick a day the following year, and bomb the **** out of Afghanistan.

repeat forever.

Costs for us are low....no casualties on our side. The Taliban are left to either a) continue trying to establish a city that is forever bombed or b) live in caves.

either way, we win.

sure, I know...there will be some "civilian casualties"...but that's the cost of War. I can live with it!

If the peaceful Afghans don't want to be bombed, they can rid themselves of the Taliban...if not, no big whoop.

Edited by jhunter1163: 

Edited for rule 10. Do not swear or used masked profanity in your posts.

 

[UWdude]

Your strategic genius is amazing. Did you learn that from Risk or Stratego?

I also love how afghans are supposed to get rid of the taleban, when the most advanced and richest military and country in the world can't. Maybe we should bomb America until it gets rid of the Taleban.

 

[FireGarden]

Apparently, it's our fault. Sorry.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101126/ap_on_re_eu/afghan_taliban_impostor_2

A senior Afghan official has blamed the British secret service for bringing a Taliban impostor to take part in top-level peace talks with the Afghan government, newspapers reported Friday.

[...] Afghan intelligence later found that the impostor was a shopkeeper from the Pakistani city of Quetta, he said.

[...] The Times of London reported that MI6, Britain's foreign spy service, paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to the impostor to keep the talks on track.

TimesOnLine seems to want you to login. This looks like the story, though:
http://freedomsyndicate.com/fair0000/times0048.html

One source with knowledge of the affair described it as simply “a major ****-up”.

[...] The British were convinced of the man’s bona fides and flew “Mansour” from Quetta to Kabul on a British C130 transport aircraft on a number of occasions.

[...] In June, the CIA apparently remained sceptical about MI6’s “coup”. Leon Panetta, the CIA Director, went on public record to say that no serious approach was under way.

[...] By September General Petraeus was briefing reporters, including The Times, that negotiations involved senior Taleban figures. In October he went farther, saying that the senior-level contacts were travelling in and out of Afghanistan on Nato aircraft. One Western official said that those who raised doubts about the “Mansour” programme were swept aside. In London, briefings were going to ministerial level and above in Government.