Payments to Taliban widespread
Yet ANOTHER sign of the fecklessness of the age of B.O.’s role as the so-called leader of the NATO alliance.
NATO officially denies that any of its members pay insurgents in Afghanistan for peace, but military sources said yesterday the practice is widespread among foreign forces fighting the Taliban….
The Times newspaper said 10 French troops killed in Sarobi, near Kabul, last year had not properly assessed the risks, because their Italian predecessors failed to inform them they had paid the Taliban not to attack them.
The Italian government described the British newspaper’s report as “totally baseless” and said it had “never authorised any kind of money payment to members of the Taliban insurrection in Afghanistan”.
No, of COURSE not. They are SHOCKED at such a thought!
But a senior Afghan official suggested otherwise. “I certainly can confirm that we were aware that the Italian forces were paying the opposition in Sarobi not to attack them,” he said….
I can tell you that lots of countries under the NATO umbrella operating out in rural parts of Afghanistan do pay the militants for not attacking them,” the senior Afghan official said.He added that it “seems to be the practice with military forces from some NATO countries, excluding the US forces under NATO, the British forces and the whole coalition forces” under the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom.
“I think more than 50 per cent of NATO forces deployed in rural Afghanistan have such deals or at least have struck such deals” to ensure peace, the official said.
At least the U.S. isn’t yet sucked into this deal, nor apparently is the U.K. (Perhaps they still remember the original Danes!) One wonders why B.O. can’t call upon his worshipful Euro friends to buck up and take care of the business at hand.
In Western history this has been tried repeatedly, going back to the days of the Saxon Kings of Britain (up to and including Alfred the Great) who learned a sad lesson:
DANEGELD
It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation,
To call upon a neighbour and to say:
“We invaded you last night – we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away.”And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld
And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:
“Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray,
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say:“We never pay any one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost,
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!”– Rudyard Kipling
The U.S. itself historically confronted this lesson early in the Republic’s history when the North African Islamic states demanded “tribute” money to protect merchant ships from government-sponsored piracy. In response Congress proclaimed “Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute!”, they went on and voted to build a real Navy, and then sent the ships to the Mediterranean to FORCE the Pirates of Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli to refrain from attacking U.S. ships any more. This provided the setting for the line in the US Marine Hymn: “…to the shores of Tripoli.”
Of course now, with the enervated state of the Western powers, including the U.S., no one can muster the intestinal fortitude to deal with the Somali piracy, either. It’s comparable to the sometimes encountered inner city phenomena called the “known crack-house”. Everyone knows who and where the bad guys are, but no one with the power to act has the cojones to pull the chain on them, for whatever reason….
The barbarians are through the gates!