I screwed up on my dates....
....in my first post on this thread. I was referring to the following:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB325/doc02.pdfDocument 2 – State 109130
U.S. Department of State, Cable, "The Secretary’s Lunch With Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar," June 22, 2001, Confidential, 8 pp. [Excised]
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has lunch on June 19, 2001 with Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar to discuss Afghanistan, U.S. sanctions and Pakistan-China relations. Secretary Powell encourages the Foreign Minister to explain Pakistan’s involvement in Afghanistan as “the United States and Pakistan have different perspectives about the Taliban.” Minister Sattar describes the Pakistan-Taliban "relationship as ‘reasonable, but not problem free,’ and listed points of contention such as: smuggling of goods through Afghanistan to Pakistan, Afghan refugee/migrant flows into Pakistan, and Pakistani fugitives in Afghanistan.”
I've got more (you all know by now I like to use references for my comments. Plain ole' opinion kinda bores me right now....you guys got good reads for me, I'll read them).
We strung things out during the Afghan campaign a lot longer than we needed to because we believed our own fairy tales about that region and our ability to outsmart locals when they did the outsmarting. Given the location of prominent Al Q leaders within that country, they did a lot of outsmarting of us (even if the leadership didn't know about OBL, it means they weren't looking very hard and so that is kind of outstmarting us too). I can understand why people want to sweep this stuff under the rug. I sometimes think there is a touch of the "soft bigotry of low expectations" about our dealings in that part of the world.
PS: I mean, read that document. We keep doing the same things over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again and expect different results. At this point, though, I am waiting for the history books and more interviews and declassified material. I need more intellectually. And to go all school marm on you, young people lurking, you demand more too.
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