The Death of the Grown-Up | Diana West > Home - Afghanistan: When Diminishing Returns Hit Rock Bottom

The good news is there are a mere 75 terrorist "operatives" left in all of Afghanistan.

The bad news is the US government wants our very special US Special Forces to remain in Afghanistan indefinitely to continue to hunt them.

Is that the best use of our men and money? Of course not. After all, if these terrorist ops represent such a dire threat to 300 million Americans at home, it is much easier and cheaper and safer to curtail or just plain halt Afghan entry into the US until all 75 of them are captured or killed -- by the Afghans -- and barricade our borders with our soon-to-be homecoming troops instead of the World War II Memorial,right?

Fortunately, like me, the Afghan government is also completely opposed to our forces remaining in Afghanistan indefinitiely to do the hunting -- more good news. But the US is boo-hooing that this means we might not be able to spend billions more dollars in Afghanistan on projects and programs that will go down the drain with the rest of them.

Call it a wonderful impasse: the perfect "crisis" not to waste to get the heck of out of Hellhole Afghanistan ASAP -- and bring US POW Bowe Berghdal with us.

Let me back up. In today's New York Times, there a report on the impasse between US and Afghan negotiators.

The impasse, after a year of talks, has increased the prospect of what the Americans call the zero option — complete withdrawal — when the NATO combat mission concludes at the end of 2014. That is precisely the outcome they hoped to avoid in Afghanistan, after having engaged in a similarly problematic withdrawal from Iraq two years ago.

I've been calling for complete withdrawal from Afghanistan since 2009 because no amount of foot patrolling, New Age generals, Islamic brownie points, dhimmifying the military, fighting for the Afghan people's trust-slash-Islamic hearts and minds, stuff, money, taking off ballistic glasses, making the military defenseless, turning a blind eye to pedophilia, no amount of goat deliveries, no amount of sheep deliveries -- no amount of COIN -- will ever make Islamic Afghanistan or Islamic Iraq or anywhere else in the Islamic world (umma) contributing parts of a Western alliance against jihad, sharia, corruption, terrorism, drugs or anything else Western civilization itself depends on staving off.

But the so-called Zero Option of withdrawal is not the only point to consider here.

Moreover, a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan could be far costlier than it was in Iraq. It would force European powers to pull their forces as well, risking a dangerous collapse in confidence among Afghans and giving a boost to the Taliban, which remain a potent threat.

If the New York Times reporter knows this, and now New York Times readers know this, so does Hamid Karzai.

He doesn't care. Or, possibly, he cares, but is powerless to offer compromises to satisfy his American patrons, and that amounts to the same thing. Worth noting is that a jihadist known as KSM's "mentor" is now a presidential candidate in Afghanistan's elections. Does that make Hamid Karzai's brother, also a candidate, look good by comparison? Not to me. Remember when Karzai urged Mullah Omar to run for president? Or when he issued one his many ultimatums against the "occupying armies" (US-led ISAF)? Or threatened to "join the Taliban"? Funny guy, right? Funny brother, I'm sure. Good thing the Karzais have salted away so many millions of US taxpayer dollars in a Qatari-Swiss bank account somewhere.

It could also jeopardize vital aid commitments. Afghanistan is decades away from self-sufficiency — it currently covers only about 20 percent of its own bills, with the rest paid by the United States and its allies....

Please jeopardize vital aid commitments. The fact is, American tapayers have no self-interest, no national interest in fully funding up a sharia society that permits and enables child rape, female oppression, religious persecution, opium production, and corruption on a colossal scale,

Many contentious matters in the talks have already been settled, like legal immunity for American troops, which is what scuttled the Iraq deal, Afghan and American officials said. Yet officials on both sides say two seemingly intractable issues remain.

The first is Afghanistan’s insistence that the United States guarantee its security, much like any NATO ally, [is that all????] and the second is Mr. Karzai’s refusal to allow American forces to keep searching in Afghanistan for operatives of Al Qaeda. Instead, he has proposed that the United States give its intelligence information to Afghan forces and let them do the searching, said Aimal Faizi, a spokesman for the president.