{"id":106498,"date":"2020-10-23T11:25:27","date_gmt":"2020-10-23T15:25:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=106498"},"modified":"2020-10-23T11:25:27","modified_gmt":"2020-10-23T15:25:27","slug":"are-we-back-to-helping-the-taliban","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=106498","title":{"rendered":"Are we back to helping the Taliban?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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According to the Washington Post, we are. They say we’re running a “Taliban Air Force” (tongue in cheek) for them by providing air support in the Taliban’s fight against ISIS. If true, things really do go full circle. What could possibly go wrong?<\/p>\n

Army Sgt. 1st Class Steve Frye was stuck on base last summer in Afghanistan, bored and fiddling around on a military network, when he came across live video footage of a battle in the Korengal Valley, where he had first seen combat 13 years earlier. It was infamous terrain, where at least 40 U.S. troops had died over the years, including some of Frye\u2019s friends. Watching the Reaper drone footage closely, he saw that no American forces were involved in the fighting, and none from the Afghan government. Instead, the Taliban and the Islamic State were duking it out. Frye looked for confirmation online. Sure enough, America\u2019s old enemy and its newer one were posting photos and video to propaganda channels as they tussled for control of the Korengal and its lucrative timber business.<\/p>\n

What Frye didn\u2019t know was that U.S. Special Operations forces were preparing to intervene in the fighting in Konar province in eastern Afghanistan \u2014 not by attacking both sides, but by using strikes from drones and other aircraft to help the Taliban. \u201cWhat we\u2019re doing with the strikes against ISIS is helping the Taliban move,\u201d a member of the elite Joint Special Operations Command counterterrorism task force based at Bagram air base explained to me earlier this year, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the assistance was secret. The air power would give them an advantage by keeping the enemy pinned down.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

In reality, even as its warplanes have struck the Taliban in other parts of Afghanistan, the U.S. military has been quietly helping the Taliban to weaken the Islamic State in its Konar stronghold and keep more of the country from falling into the hands of the group, which \u2014 unlike the Taliban \u2014 the United States views as an international terrorist organization with aspirations to strike America and Europe. Remarkably, it can do so without needing to communicate with the Taliban, by observing battle conditions and listening in on the group. Two members of the JSOC task force and another defense official described the assistance to me this year in interviews for a book about the war in Konar, all of them speaking on the condition of anonymity because they weren\u2019t authorized to talk about it. (The U.S. military headquarters in Afghanistan declined to comment for this story.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

More at the source. This article foregoes the usual anonymous sources the Washington Post normally cites, so I’ll give it more creedence. Thanks to Jeff LPH 3 for the tip. Source; Washington Post\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to the Washington Post, we are. They say we’re running a “Taliban Air Force” (tongue … Are we back to helping the Taliban?<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":664,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[213,301,177,9,406,307,458],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-106498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-your-tax-dollars-at-work","category-afghanistan","category-dumbass-bullshit","category-foreign-policy","category-guest-link","category-isis","category-taliban"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/664"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=106498"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":106499,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106498\/revisions\/106499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=106498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=106498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=106498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}