Liz Cheney: How to lose a war, but not end it

[TomSea]

Opinion | How to lose a war, but not end it
By Liz Cheney August 20

Link to AP picture
A woman cries at a memorial service Tuesday as she touches a display of photographs of victims of a suicide bomb attack at a wedding in Kabul. (Rafiq Maqbool/AP)

Liz Cheney is the lone U.S. representative from Wyoming and currently serves as the House Republican Conference chair. She previously served in the State Department, including as the principal deputy assistant secretary for the Middle East.

President Trump knows a bad deal when he sees one. He extricated the United States from President Barack Obama’s disastrous nuclear accord with Iran. He pulled us out of an arms-control agreement with Russia that Vladimir Putin repeatedly violated. But if news reports are accurate, the State Department is about to capitulate to the Taliban, al-Qaeda’s longtime ally, as U.S. forces are withdrawn from Afghanistan. The president should reject this deal.

Throughout the talks in Doha, Qatar, there has been nothing the Taliban could do to make the State Department walk away from the table. The group has conducted daily attacks resulting in the deaths of Afghan civilians, U.S. soldiers and our allies. It has dispatched suicide bombers throughout the country. Its men have terrorized the Afghan population, targeting women and girls. They have done all this while continuing to harbor and fight alongside al-Qaeda in an alliance the two groups have maintained for decades. Just recently, the Taliban released a video justifying the 9/11 hijackings and other terrorist attacks in the West. The Taliban bragged the deadliest day of terror in our history was a “heavy slap” on American faces.

Despite all of this and more, special representative Zalmay Khalilzad, who has led the talks, says he is satisfied with the Taliban’s supposed counterterrorism assurances.

Read more at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/liz-cheney-mr-president-youre-not-about-to-end-a-war-youre-about-to-lose-it/2019/08/20/f412147a-c35c-11e9-9986-1fb3e4397be4_story.html