Posted by
Gary Gross on Tuesday, October 03, 2006 4:53:28 PM
It's apparent that Nancy Pelosi is upset with Bill Frist if you read this press release. The bad news for Pelosi is that she obviously didn't look at Sen. Frist's VOLPAC blog. If she had, she would've known that the AP got something wrong. AGAIN.Here's the first paragraph from Pelosi's statement: "We went to war in Afghanistan five years ago to crush the Taliban for the role it played in the 9/11 attacks. Sen. Frist now suggests that the best way forward in Afghanistan is to coddle the Taliban by welcoming Taliban members into a coalition government, as if 9/11 had never happened."
If Sen. Frist had actually said that, Ms. Pelosi's anger would be justified. Unfortunately, the AP article got it wrong: U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday that the Afghan guerrilla war can never be won militarily and called for efforts to bring the Taliban and their supporters into the Afghan government.
The Tennessee Republican said he had learned from briefings that Taliban fighters were too numerous and had too much popular support to be defeated by military means. "You need to bring them into a more transparent type of government," Frist said during a brief visit to a U.S. and Romanian military base in the southern Taliban stronghold of Qalat. "And if that's accomplished we'll be successful."
Frist said asking the Taliban to join the government was a decision to be made by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Unfortunately, that isn't accurate. Here's Mr. Frist's post on his VOLPAC blog:
Having discussed the situation with commanders on the ground, I believe that we cannot stabilize Afghanistan purely through military means. Our counter-insurgency strategy must win hearts and minds and persuade moderate Islamists potentially sympathetic to the Taliban to accept the legitimacy of the Afghan national government and democratic political processes.
Ms. Pelosi would be well-advised to not trust everything she reads in the Agenda Media, especially foreign reports from the AP. Someone should tell her that she'd get more accurate information from the Right Blogosphere. Technorati: Taliban, Afghanistan, Frist, PelosiCross-posted at Let Freedom Ring Blog