The Taliban is so misunderstood – all they were saying was give peace a chance

We can cut a deal with the Taliban. US Defence Secretary Mark Esper channels John Lennon, The Australian, Monday:

… a truce agreement between Washington and the Taliban that could lead to the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan is not without risk but “looks very promising” … It’s my view as well that we have to give peace a chance …

If peace shows its head around here, we’ll cut it off. The Atlantic, January 9, 2013:

After the Taliban lured (Afghanistan president Mohammad Najibullah) and his brother out of the UN compound where they had found shelter, they tortured and castrated Najibullah, then dragged him from the back of a vehicle … both men’s “bloodied bodies hung from a traffic pylon outside the palace walls, their cadavers mutilated”.

They wouldn’t dare do that to us. The Guardian, September 28, 2014:

An Australian citizen has been tortured and killed by the Taliban in ­Afghanistan, according to his family. Sayyed Habib, a 56-year-old who lived in Sydney, was … shot three times, once through his neck and twice in the chest, with signs that he had been tortured before he was killed.

Australian Muslim leader Uthman Badar was on the Taliban’s side. Herald Sun, October 25, 2010:

Like so many self-loathing Muslim supremacists, he is engaged in a war against all sorts of targets, limited only by bigotry and imagination. When the Marlon Brando character Johnny is asked in The Wild One what he’s rebelling against, he ­famously responds with “Whaddya got?” Mr Badar sounds like that, only less articulate.

Australia lost 41 lives seeking to help Afghanistan enter the enlightened world. The Herald Sun continues:

“Not for the first time in history, Australian lives are being used as cannon fodder for the imperial designs of others,” said Mr Badar, to whom democracy “is an illusion”.

In a democracy, murder is not the price for girls to go to school. London Telegraph, January 5, 2006:

Taliban militants beheaded a headmaster in southern Afghanistan in the latest fatal attacks targeted at teachers and schools. The killers forced his wife and children to watch the murder … Under the Taliban interpretation of sharia law, female education is banned.

The West would never deal with such savages. The Guardian, September 14, 2019:

Donald Trump has declared talks between the US and the Taliban “dead” … following a car-bomb attack in Kabul … “They’re dead so far as I’m concerned … They thought that to kill people in order to put themselves in a little better negotiating position when they did that, they killed 12 people … And you can’t do that, can’t do that with me. So they’re dead as far as I’m concerned. And we’ve hit the Taliban harder in the last four days than they’ve been hit in over 10 years.”

A man of his word. A hard man. Never a backwards step. CNN, Nov­ember 30, 2019:

President Donald Trump has announced the US is talking to the Taliban and claimed they are eager to make a deal, less than three months after he suddenly called off official negotiations. “The Taliban wants to make a deal, and we’re meeting with them,” the President said during an unannounced trip to Afghanistan on Thursday to visit American troops for Thanksgiving.