"This is outrageous," said a woman. "I think that people have to show courage in Canada and around the world, and stand up and say we don't believe in this kind of war." -- CBC News
his woman is one of many, apparently thousands, of delusionary mush-brains who think it's productive to negotiate with a pack of bloodthirsty woman-hating homosexual-killing murderer-protecting thugs. The Taliban's twisted religious arguments are no more subject to useful
discourse than those which justify murdering abortionists. There is no sane solution to the Afghanistan problem which leaves the Taliban in control, and asking them to leave is literally like asking the Pope to surrender the Vatican.
There has been damn little about non-violent solutions to terrorism that don't involve trite crap about how 'killing solves nothing' and 'war is not the answer'. Balderdash! I pull weeds -- squash mosquitoes -- live in a wooden house -- eat meat -- shave my legs. In all those cases killing is a perfectly valid solution and if you distinguish between a so-called sentient life form and the rest of the ecosystem then you're making a larger judgment call than I'm prepared to endorse.
Moreover, there has been no comprehensive non-violent solution, and it's not for lack of trying. War, especially over large distances, is extraordinarily expensive; peace simply requires good faith and common sense. Given the numbers of anti-war demonstrators agitating globally one would expect that if there were a sensible alternative to war with Afghanistan that it would, statistically, have turned up by now. The anti-war movement has had as much time as the pro-war, and could call on virtually the entire planet to support its aims if it came up with a practical plan. Nobody wants war, not even Republicans, except the guys that started it, and they're psychopaths.
Globalization has a mind-blowing number of evils, but it has also, in the industralized world, exchanged physical conflict for economic conflict. This is an enormous step forward in exactly the same way that democracy is hugely better than rule by heredity or force -- that is, horribly corrupt, cruel and degraded, but as sick as it is, humanity has seen radically worse. Being broke bars a man from medical and lifestyle advances that lengthen and improve his life, but lack of cash never directly killed or maimed a man's body, (loansharking notwithstanding) it's only hurt his mind, which is quite an improvement. I'll take a broken heart over a missing leg any day -- and unless you're a fool, so would you.
Democracy is not the be-all-end-all of human sociopolitical development -- in due course it may be necessary to root out democracy out by force from backward countries where brilliance and growth are suffocated by doughy envelopes of lowest common denominator. Today, though, half a loaf is better than an exploding one.
The biggest danger we face is not finishing the job. It's not enough to smash Al-Qaida and the Taliban; it's necessary to put a relatively functional and sane government in their place. Beyond that, the United Nations must enforce a World Court where large-scale conflicts are judged, and with the power to enforce same. Where environmentalists could class-action charge major polluters; Adobe would challenge Dmitri Sklyarov (or not); Quebec would petition to secede from Canada (and Canada countercharge the FLQ); the IRA would be legitimized or destroyed; Jerusalem finally established as the birthplace of a peaceful and tolerant religion instead of a bloodsoaked tug-of-war hangman's rope; women could force men to ask for driving directions and men force women to actually say what they're pissed off about.
The price of freedom is nonsense. Every bit of nonsense we give up makes us a little more free.
Milk-liver'd man!
That bear'st a cheek for blows, a head for wrongs,
Who hast not in thy brows an eye discerning
Thine honour from thy suffering, that not know'st
Fools do those villains pity who are punish'd
Ere they have done their mischief, where's thy drum?
France spreads his banners in our noiseless land,
With plumed helm thy state begins to threat;
Whiles thou, a moral fool, sits still, and cries,
"Alack, why does he so?"
-- Goneril,King Lear IV.ii, Shakespeare