Jenifer (Zarknorph) said:  As elections loom, Taliban suicide bombers kill 48 people in two separate attacks in Afghanistan.

The Taliban will do the same as we would do in their circumstances - kill the collaborators with the occupiers.

The Taliban are trying to stifle democracy  such attacks are not rare when people are allowed to think and chose 

BM

bml00 said:  The Taliban are trying to stifle democracy  such attacks are not rare when people are allowed to think and chose 

Stop beating and robbing and killing Christians and Muslims from their lands, BM and over-running still more borders and spreading chaos and suffering in all directions.

Does any of this have any connection at all to the TALIBAN?

Di (amina046) said:

The Washington Post's Afghanistan Papers Show That the War Was Doomed From the Start The main culprit? Corruption.

Loads of words designed to blame the victims for the problems we've created them.

Sarah Chayes, who served as an adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and who lived in Afghanistan for several years, told the investigators in 2015 that the problem was rooted in Washington. Fighting terrorism was the chief U.S. mission, and some officials understood that corruption is a cause of terrorism. But, Chayes said, the notion “hasn’t sunk in enough for the causal flip to happen”—i.e., for the officials to see that countering corruption had to be a key ingredient in countering terrorism.

A major obstacle here, she said, was the “culture” in the State Department and the Pentagon, which focused on building relationships with their counterparts abroad. Since Afghan officials at all levels were corrupt, officials feared that going after corruption would endanger those relationships.

Chayes also said it was a big mistake to be “obsessed with chasing” the Taliban, to the point of neglecting the country’s political dynamics. We didn’t realize that many Afghans were “thrilled with the Taliban” for kicking corrupt warlords out of power. Instead, we aligned ourselves with the warlords, on the adage that “the enemy of our enemy is our friend”—and, as a result, further alienated the Afghan people and further enriched the corrupt powers, which in turn further inflamed the anti-government terrorists.

Difficult to believe that the concept of "Lessons Learned" ever occurred to anyone. Surely the message of "wars" like Afghanistan and Vietnam is that they're dedicated to not learning the lessons.

Written by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, an agency created by Congress in 2008 to investigate waste and fraud, the report, titled “Lessons Learned,” is the most thorough official critique of an ongoing American war since the Vietnam War review commissioned in 1967 by then–Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. (Daniel Ellsberg leaked what came to be known as the Pentagon Papers in 1971; though widely disseminated, they were officially declassified only in 2011.)

Di (amina046) said:

The Washington Post's Afghanistan Papers Show That the War Was Doomed From the Start The main culprit? Corruption.

An earlier article that might be a bit more honest.

But I've added a picture that might be a lot more honest.

Afghanistan in 2019: Fewer US Troops, More CIA Torture and Killings

January 5th, 2019 - No other country in the world symbolizes the decline of the American empire as much as Afghanistan. There is virtually no possibility of a military victory over the Taliban and little chance of leaving behind a self-sustaining democracy  -  facts that Washington’s policy community has mostly been unable to accept ... It is a vestigial limb of empire, and it is time to let it go.   https://dissidentvoice.org/2019/01/afghanistan-in-2019-fewer-us-troops-more-cia-torture-and-killings/

If negotiations are underway it is then only possible because both sides recognize that neither side can win , whether the US is right or wrong their power has pushed the Taliban to negotiate and better jaw jaw than war war

BM

bml00 said:

If negotiations are underway

You think the terrorism could stop?

Not going to do so in Jerusalem and Hebron though, is it?