Back To The Mullahs

by digby

Somebody please tell me how the following statements could have possibly been wrong because they were “taken out of context?”

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday that the Afghan guerrilla war can never be won militarily and called for efforts to bring the Taliban and their supporters into the Afghan government.

The Tennessee Republican said he had learned from briefings that Taliban fighters were too numerous and had too much popular support to be defeated by military means.

“You need to bring them into a more transparent type of government,” Frist said during a brief visit to a U.S. and Romanian military base in the southern Taliban stronghold of Qalat. “And if that’s accomplished we’ll be successful.”

Frist said asking the Taliban to join the government was a decision to be made by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Sen. Mel Martinez, a Republican from Florida accompanying Frist, said negotiating with the Taliban was not “out of the question” but that fighters who refused to join the political process would have to be defeated.

“A political solution is how it’s all going to be solved,” he said.

Frist may have ben speaking out of turn, but I think he was probably saying what he’s been hearing privately. And it explains why the admnistration has been acting so strangely about that truce between Pakistan and Mullah Omar in Waziristan a couple of weeks ago. The policy in Afghanistan is changing, only they aren’t telling anybody. And apparently that means allowing the Taliban back in power.

Aside from the absurdity of allowing that threat to fester again, this means that all that talk about freedom and democracy is, as we suspected, bullshit. They would be handing the women of Afghanistan back to the people who do this:

.