55:37 This is not an 18-month commitment. “I was in the White House last week. I’ll give you first-hand what their thinking is — it’s an indefinite commitment. . . . At 18 months we’re going to be evaluating whether our strategy is working. . . . We’re not saying forever…. We might go from 100,000 to 98,000 [troops] if we are succeeding.”

01:06:48 We are going around Karzai. “We know we don’t have much going with Hamid Karzai and the central government. You’ve got to go around it. Hence the bottom-up approach.”

01:09:28 Announcing an exit date was a big mistake. “He [Obama] said that [the exit date] because he had to for domestic consumption.” In answer to a question about Afghans and Pakistanis planning around our announced strategy and therefore hedging their bets, Weinbaum concurred. “Exactly. I asked the same question at the White House. This is the problem. . . . You’ve made it all al Qaeda. . . . Media sources in the region [AfPak] played up not the speech [Obama gave] but the date. . . . An unintended consequence but a serious one.”

01:18:20 “We had better realize what we are facing.” “When it appears we are getting out, there will be a rush to the exit. What will be the consequence? Very quickly, a return to fighting. . . . Iranians and Russians and their clients, Indians and Saudis, all jump in. . . . Pakistan picks up their Pashtun card. . . . everyone trying to salvage what they can for their own interests . . . Afghanistan becomes a killing field. . . Taliban come back in to settle scores. . . . There is a refugee crisis and a humanitarian crisis tracked back to the international command [now in Afghanistan]. . . . The Taliban, these are not nationalists [as they were before 2001]. Now they all share the idea of an Islamic state in their image. It is the caliphate for this region.”

To watch the full Q&A, follow the link below.

The question raised now is: will American troops in Afghanistan be able to get natives equally prepared in the brief timeframe laid out for them?

President of Afghanistan, Hamad Karzai, announced today that he would be willing to talk with Taliban leadership– yes, the same people that have completely destabilized his country and terrorized his people– in hopes of peace.

When Whitehouse spokesman, Robert Gibbs, was asked “to what extent, if any, the White House’s Afghan strategy will involve negotiating with Taliban leaders?” He responded by saying negotiations and diplomacy with the Taliban would only occur with those officials who “are willing to walk away from the type of activity they’ve been involved in.” Once that occurs, Gibbs added, “reintegration into society is certainly possible.”

Is everyone nuts? Since when do we consider terrorists/extremists people that can be reasoned with? Huffington Post journalist, Sam Stein, made a great point in saying “The circumstances confronting the Karzai and the Obama administrations are vastly different with respect to the diplomatic approaches they can or will take with the Taliban. Karzai’s compelling strategic interest is to foster political stability within his borders. The United States’s imperative is to eliminate threats to national security”.

I suppose it shouldn’t be too shocking that Karzai is willing to negotiate with the Taliban, considering he spent his last administration making deals with their leaders… but I certainly hope President Obama doesn’t choose to follow suit. At this point it doesn’t seem that President Obama and his aides are not preparing to have direct negotiations with the Taliban and I hope that no matter what Karzai chooses to do that it stays that way.

He ends the article saying, “Pakistan and Afghanistan were shortsightedly abandoned to their fate by the West in 1989, in spite of the fact that they were the ones who won a victory for the Free World against the Soviet Union. This abandonment lead to a sense of betrayal amongst the people of the region. For the sake of regional and world peace, let us not repeat the same mistake.”

To read the entire article click on the link below.