Afghan truce lasted 72 hours

1812; British-Afghan peace is abruptly broken

Stephen Green has the story, and includes a prescient quote from Richard Fernandez, circa 2010.

The sane U.S. response would be to pack it up and go home.

There's no peace to be found in Afghanistan, at least not with the low level of violence we're willing to commit there. More than 18 years after the attacks of 9/11/2001, the American people don't have the stomach for killing the number of fighting-age males it would take to force peace on the Taliban. And any attempt at a power-sharing arrangement between the Taliban and Kabul -- the administration's current goal -- is doomed to failure. Kabul is corrupt to its core, and will never earn the love or respect of the Afghan people. As for the Taliban, for them, power-sharing is nothing more than a necessary step on the way to toppling the Ghani government. Even then, fighting in the countryside would continue, so it doesn't matter much who ostensibly is in charge in Kabul.

"But that's the place where Osama bin Laden trained al Qaeda and launched the 9/11 attacks!" some people still say. But so what? As our own Richard Fernandez wrote in 2010:

To jump from the correct idea that defeating the forces which "attacked American on 9/11" were an existential threat to the idea that ergo Afghanistan was a war of necessity was a huge non sequitur. Afghanistan happened to be the place from which Osama Bin launched his attack on September 11. Admiral Nagumo launched his infamous attack on Pearl Harbor from a nameless patch of ocean 200 miles North of Oahu. But Admiral King had the sense to understand that the location itself had little significance. It was the Kido Butai, the ten carriers which made up the Japanese Fast Carrier force which momentarily occupied that ocean waste that he had to destroy. While the Kido Butai existed it could move across the vast spaces and attack at a point of its choosing. While it survived every patch of ocean was dangerous. Once it had been neutralized all the oceans of the world were potentially safe.

Yet here we are ten years after Fernandez wrote that, which was nearly nine years after 9/11, still trying to make a nation out of the untamable patch of ground from which the attacks were launched.

Back in September, 2001, this armchair warrior thought we were going to engage in a punitive expedition* in Afghanistan: kick-ass and go home. It’s a tactic successfully employed for thousands of years, and would certainly have been a wiser choice than, as was said at the time, bring Afghanistan up to the Stone Age. Fortunately, the country’s brightest minds saw the folly in that approach.

*Defined by Ellery Stowell in 1921:

When the territorial sovereign is too weak or is unwilling to enforce respect for international law, a state which is wronged may find it necessary to invade the territory and to chastise the individuals who violate its rights and threaten its security.