Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Biden the Mathematician: 5% "incorrigible" Taliban + 25% on the fence = 70% "moderate"

BRUSSELS: Vice President Joe Biden said at least 70 percent of Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan are mercenaries who could be persuaded to lay down their arms, stepping up U.S. calls for outreach to “moderate” elements of the insurgency.

Biden said the same tactics used in Anbar province in Iraq, where radical Sunni Muslims were co-opted by American financial support, could work in Afghanistan as part of President Barack Obama’s strategy for winning the war raging since 2001.

“Five percent of the Taliban is incorrigible, not susceptible to anything other than being defeated,” Biden told a press conference at North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels today. “Another 25 percent or so are not quite sure, in my view, of the intensity of their commitment to the insurgency. Roughly 70 percent are involved because of the money.”

Insurgent activity in Afghanistan rose last year to the highest level since the U.S. ousted the Taliban after the Sept. 11 attacks, and coordinated suicide bombings last month shook the capital, Kabul.

“We are not now winning the war, but the war is far from lost,” Biden said.

Thus, according to the vice president of the U.S., 70% of the Taliban -- those guys responsible for spraying girls with acid, blowing up shrines, daily murdering infidels and apostates, fighting and dying in the name of sharia law -- are "moderate"; they only act that way because they're poor. So why not reach out to them? If only we give them lots of money, perhaps they'll go away -- only, of course, to regroup with better weapons, and come back to fight another day. But Biden and Obama will be out of office by then, so what do they care? Besides, Fareed Zakaria said so.


We should just pull out of this part of the world. They will just kill each other until the house of islam is so weak that we will be able to just walk in and mop up.

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