As Taliban Talk Peace, ISIS Is Ready to Play the Spoiler in Afghanistan

Caliphates have happened throughout history. Let them fight it out. Why do we in the West think that we can control their destiny. We don't even understand it. Get our people out of country. Why should one soldier die for these people? Tomorrow another caliphate will come out of the desert, as is proven by history

We will not resolve the problems in Afghanistan by our continued presence. ISIS cannot exist in a vacuum. They are drawing support from somewhere. Unless and until the source of that support can be identified and neutralized, nothing will change. Bring the troops home.

There SURELY is enough BLAME. To be shared, equitably. as well as not, for every group. Whatever their names. And IT will BE. As IT always has been. Garbed in transparent as well as hidden-isms; Ideological underpinnings. Short and longer term agendas. Seeded, nurtured and harvested by traditionalized personal unaccountability for the ensuing implications and outcomes, temporary and more permanent, of violating words and actions in the name(s) of PRINCIPLES bereft of menschlichkeit!

Who are we kidding? Only ourselves. Within a short time after American withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Afghan factions will be at each other's throats with the same ferocity as ever. Afghanistan is no place for the use of Western military power. So many senseless American lives lost. Will we never learn from history?

Could the Afghans ever own their security and hence their own security. Billions have been spent on the Afghan National Force and together with the Taliban, if both of them can not reduce the level of violence, after a peace deal, then what good is a peace deal. Who opposes this merger, is the big question. ISIS was never a stakeholder, so to what end is it operating other wrecking the possibility of an agreement.

WE spent billions on a Afghan police-Army and they are totally helpless to protect themselves? Time to recognize this is a deep hole with no bottom.

Most of this analyses is correct. I agree that if the Taliban were to have another round of the talks with the US, the Taliban would fracture, the Taliban leadership would be killed by disgruntled Taliban militants for betraying and selling them out, there would be mass defections to IS-K from the Taliban, the IS-K would replace the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the flag of Jihad in Afghanistan would change from a white one to a black one with simply the Shahada on it.

"...the Islamic State’s Afghan chapter..., a legacy of the C.I.A.’s use of Islamic jihadists, the mujahedeen, in its effort to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s." The above statement crystalizes the idiocy and shortsightedness of America's Cold Warriors better than anything I've read elsewhere. We created a global Islamic jihad that has cost us trillions of dollars and untold numbers of deaths and dismembered young people, and all for what: to radicalize Muslims all over the world and inspire them to become killers in behalf of their twisted interpretation of the Qur'an? If that's not bad enough, our help in creating the Afghan, Pakistani, Saudi Arabian, et al. mujahedeen was repaid by their murderous destruction of the WTC on 9/11/01. That's quite a legacy. Only unrepentant Cold Warrios convince themselves that we and the rest of the world are better off without a communist government in Afghanistan. While we still don't know what will ultimately replace the the current Afghan government if a peace deal happens, it was obvious years ago that we should never have intervened in Afghanistan to replace the commies.

Contrary to common misconception, Pakistan has no ties with the Taliban. The Taliban hates Pakistan for allowing NATO to use it as a supply route for NATO's occupation of Afghanistan (that is why the TTP was created in 2006). The Taliban should announce that they will end their talks with the US and everyone else and that their political office in Qatar has become defunct. The Taliban will kill all of the Afghan presidential election candidates, including Ashraf Ghani, in September or this month. The Taliban will kick out all the NATO invaders/occupiers, liberate all of Afghanistan, and win THIS YEAR. Btw NYTimes, you should allow people to post pictures in their comments. If I was able to do that, I would have posted a picture of a map of Afghanistan showing which areas the Taliban control, which areas the Kabul admin controls, and what areas are contested, and I would have shown an infographic from the Taliban which shows the results of the Taliban's Jihad in May, June and July.

Just watch. In a couple years the US will back in Afghanistan, fighting alongside the Taliban against ISIS. Strange bedfellows indeed.

I doubt that the Quetta Shura could persuade most rank-and-file Talibs to accept a peace agreement, but they don't really have to worry about defections to Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K) because the Taliban will not accept anything other than a complete U.S. capitulation to its demands, something that the Trump Administration seems increasingly willing to accept. And to believe that the Haqqani Network would renounce attacks against U.S. soil is not just wishful thinking, it shows delusion or dishonesty on the part of those who would support such an argument. If anyone in the U.S. Government is even thinking about the consequences of a Taliban victory in Afghanistan, maybe their calculation is that the Taliban will be too busy fighting IS-K to turn their attention to attacking the United States, or that drone attacks will degrade any capability to attack the United States. Those assumptions do not take into account that the Haqqani Network will establish their rule over Loya Paktia (Khost, Paktia, and Paktika Provinces) and reopen their terrorist training camps (one of which was where Al-Qaeda founded). And the Haqqani Network has the experience of ten plus years of being the target of drone attacks in North Waziristan to learn countermeasures against such attacks, which in themselves will be much less accurate and effective since they will no longer be based on actionable intelligence once the Taliban takes over Afghanistan.

So is Trump looking to do a Vietnam style deal? That is, the Taliban promise nothing, recognize nothing, and only withhold military action until we are gone.

Someone doesn't want the US quit Afghanistan. It's definitely not the White House, not Iran, not even Russia. That leaves other regional players who don't want Taliban return to power.

Fareed Z. had an excellent commentary on Afghanistan on CNN recently. There has been progress - he mentions that there are now 9 million children in Afghan schools there where that number was once 1 million. He also noted that this and other progress is precarious. At least some of our NATO allies have indicated continued support until 2021 and may continue support past that year. There is no reason we should be looking to beat them to the exit. Counter-insurgency, whether in Vietnam or Afghanistan or Northern Ireland or in our efforts to uproot criminal cults in the USA, is largely a social and cultural effort. Such efforts take time and may even depend on a new generation of leadership to emerge. We station our military all around the globe in near perpetuity, including in places that are in many ways less than savory. Staying the course in the hope that those 9 million students include a critical mass of patriotic, capable and honest leaders who can form a lasting government seems like an investment worth continuing. We can always decide to leave later, but constantly and publicly threatening to quit is self-defeating. It is ghastly that we cannot trust our leadership to plan and negotiate in accordance with our interests and our values behind closed doors.

Leave now or 200 years from now and the outcome will be exactly the same. The downside of another 200 years is more deaths of US soldiers, more useless expense of our treasure, and more diversion of resources and attention which could be used to a much better end here. So, why wait?

Almost impossible to make the Taliban look good, but the Islamic State has proven up to the task. Let’s leave and let them fight it out.

Negotiating with the Taliban? “John, don’t forget the ladies”!

We should put a bounty on foreign fighters in Afghanistan (excluding US fighters), but they have to be turned in dead.

I don't recall who stated this, but "The problem is not Afghanistan, the problem is Pakistan." That has always been the case, and the Pakistanis will continue to meddle in Afghanistan by whatever means they see fit. Until Pakistan is addressed, Afghanistan will continue to remain unstable and a threat.

Questions: If Pakistan has already lined up a replacement for taliban, are they really on the side of US to broker a solution? What was Mr Khan promising Mr Trump during the state visit? If Pakistan has replacement to carry out attacks in Afghanistan, wouldn’t they do similar things in Kashmir to destabilise India ? US still calls Pakistan as ally and provides aid. It doesn’t add up!!

Wouldn't it be ironic if we ended up partnering with the Taliban, as we did in the 80;s in their fight with the Soviet Union, to fight ISIS? I wouldn't put it past our politicians who swallow, hook, line, and sinker the advice by our intelligence community and military that we have to stay in Afghanistan to counter this new "threat." The military-industrial-political complex must be fed.

There is little hope for our insanely tribal species. As the planet continues to heat up, water and food grow scarcer, and natural disasters increase in number and severity, more and more of it will start to resemble Afghanistan and the Syria profiled in another of today's grim articles.

There would be no ISIS if we had not invaded Afghanistan after the Russians pulled out at the end of the 20th century. No, the fact that the WTC terrorist attack on 9/11 was concocted by Al Qaeda in Afghanistan was no reason to invade Iraq. Now we are living the consequences of bad decisions by Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, followed by continued illogical military activity by Obama. Will Trump just declare victory in Afghanistan, like Nixon in VietNam, and just remove all American troops from a country in which we have no right to station military forces.

“Mission Accomplished”, “ ISIS has been defeated”. Short sighted, ill informed comments by two Republican presidents. Both have made our Country less safe in their tenures. And the GOP and a population easily manipulated and willing to be scammed allow this. God help our children and grandchildren. We have failed them with this lack of leadership.

Since Trump's America has decided to negotiate with Taliban without the legitimate government of Afghanistan, I am waiting for the next move - Negotiate with ISIS without involving Iraq and Syria.

This is Trump's greatest risk, legacy wise. If he abandons Afghanistan without ensuring that women's rights are enshrined, then his Presidency will, when all the girl's schools get blown up, be considered America's greatest failure. Trump and Pol Pot will be placed in the same Hall of Shame.

Why US troops are still in Japan/ Korea or in Germany even after 65 years to the end of war? In Afghanistan it only 18 years. Talibans should know that US troops are going to stay there for very long period of time like Japan/ Korea and Germany, so as US general public.

Well this is rich. So...from 30,000 feet, one of our supposed “allies” in the region has nuclear weapons and is allied with and supports the most radical and militant Islamists on the planet...not to mention having harbored, albeit discreetly, Osama bin Laden for almost 10 years. This should not be new news to anyone capable of picking up and reading a book for the past 30 years. Oh...and for the sake of regional security “influence” in a country where we have been spilling blood and treasure for nearly 2 decades...they are poised to wreck havoc through a barely controllable and bloodthirsty proxy. Okay...so remind me again why I should be worried about Iran? And while you’re at it, remind me again why Iraq was invaded? This post 9/11 playing field outcome almost makes Trump’s isolationist rhetoric sound rational.

Oh, no! ISIS ready for resurgence in Afghanistan! Who would have predicted that? Right, all of us, except the president, who claimed they were entirely defeated. Well, at least we're working with the Taliban and the elected government to make sure the peace holds, women continue to have rights, and the country does not revert to a safe operating base for ISIS. Oh, wait, we excluded the government. This won't end well.

It is to the advantage of ISIS and all other foes of the United States to do what they can to sabotage peace talks between the US and the Taliban. We desperately need the talks to succeed. We must do what we can to extricate ourselves from a war in which we should have never engaged. We can't let ourselves be played by ISIS or anyone else. We need to end our presence in Afghanistan.

Many years ago, Crusaders learned that a heavily armored frontal assault did not defeat an enemy that had no intention to stand and receive that assault. When a force has the ability to melt away into the populace and countryside, it will seemingly disappear. Americans did much the same when British troops marched through Lexington on their way to Concord in search of weapons that were never found. The Vietnamese used the same tactics against people they saw as invaders, Japanese, French and Americans. One might even recall our recent misadventures in Iraq. America is failing a basic lesson taught at War College.