Obama Grovels, the Taliban Laughs

Over the course of the past three years, President Obama has done his steady best to appease the Taliban into submission.

A small synopsis of what he’s done includes the meekness he projected via his U.S. apology tour to the Middle East in 2009; his announcement shortly thereafter that U.S. troops will be out of the Taliban’s way no later than 2014, the promised troop pullout at this time; his promise to release a number of Taliban detainees at Guantanamo who are Afghans, in order to allow them to reunite with their families and, hopefully, pacify the Taliban in the process; and, most recently, in the wake of the March 11 shooting of 17 Afghan civilians by Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, he’s given $50,000 in cash to every family from which someone was killed and at least $10,000 to every family from which someone was wounded.

Also, following the Bagram Airfield burning of the religious materials that “contained extremist messages or inscriptions,” Obama’s DOD passed new rules which forbid our infidels in uniform from touching Islamic religious materials again. Moreover, the DOD even warned them not to show verbal disrespect for the Quran. And what has the U.S. received in exchange for Obama’s groveling at the feet of the Taliban? Nothing, except the weird feeling that Taliban leaders are sitting in their tents or their caves somewhere in Afghanistan laughing their butts off.

Obama’s end game through so much of this has been to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table. He is still swayed by the Vietnam War paradigm in which Lyndon Baines Johnson sacrificed tens of thousands of American lives unnecessarily in order to “win the hearts and minds” of the North Vietnamese.

But it doesn’t matter what we give the Taliban; we are not going to win their hearts and minds. They hate us. George W. Bush recognized this and strove to marginalize and defeat the Taliban while winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan civilians who were oppressed by these Islamist tyrants. And now, they are in the catbird’s seat while Obama languishes. He’s begging, but they’ve assured us they aren’t in the mood to negotiate.