While we all thought Obama was just waiting around for fate to lift any requirement for a decision on the war in Afganistan from his shoulders, it seems that his administration has been secretly crawling to the Taliban, trying to negotiate peace terms that would leave the Taliban in power in parts of Afghanistan – and being turned down.

From Islam In Action:

“US negotiators had offered the Taliban leadership through Mullah Wakil Ahmed Mutawakkil (former Taliban foreign minister) that if they accept the presence of NATO troops in Afghanistan, they would be given the governorship of six provinces in the south and northeast,” a senior Afghan Foreign Ministry official told IslamOnline.net requesting anonymity for not being authorized to talk about the sensitive issue with the media.

He said the talks, brokered by Saudi Arabia and Turkey, continued for weeks at different locations including the Afghan capital Kabul. …

A Taliban spokesman admitted indirect talks with the US. …

Afghan and Taliban sources said Mutawakkil and Mullah Mohammad Zaeef, a former envoy to Pakistan who had taken part in previous talks, represented the Taliban side in the recent talks.

The US Embassy in Kabul denied any such talks.

“No, we are not holding any talks with Taliban,” embassy spokeswoman Cathaline Haydan told IOL from Kabul.

Asked whether the US has offered any power-sharing formula to Taliban, she said she was not aware of any such offer.

“I don’t know about any specific talks and the case you are reporting is not true.”

Sources say that for the first time the American negotiators did not insist on the “minus-Mullah Omer” formula, which had been the main hurdle in previous talks between the two sides.

The Americans reportedly offered Taliban a form of power-sharing in return for accepting the presence of foreign troops.

“America wants 8 army and air force bases in different parts of Afghanistan in order to tackle the possible regrouping of Al-Qaeda network,” the senior [Afghan] official said.

He named the possible hosts of the bases as Mazar-e-Sharif and Badakshan in north, Kandahar in south [? – see below], Kabul, Herat in west, Jalalabad in northeast and Ghazni and Faryab in central Afghanistan.

In exchange, the US offered Taliban the governorship of the southern provinces of Kandahar [? -see above] , Zabul, Hilmand and Orazgan as well as the northeastern provinces of Nooristan and Kunar.

These provinces are the epicenter of resistance against the US-led foreign forces and are considered the strongholds of Taliban.

Orazgan and Hilmand are the home provinces of Taliban Supreme Commander Mullah Omer and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

“But Taliban did not agree on that,” said the senior official.

“Their demand was that America must give a deadline for its pull out if it wants negotiations to go on.”

Far from stopping Iran from making nuclear weapons, the Obama administration has legitimized its efforts and given it yet more time to advance its project.

From Investors.com (Investor’s Business Daily):

The mullahs ruling Islamofascist Iran are having a fine laugh at the easily beguiled infidels running U.S. foreign policy. First they agree to a nuclear “diplomatic breakthrough.” Then they say no.

The week before last, when Iran’s negotiators agreed to send most of its enriched uranium out of the country, diplomats in the U.S. and Europe were popping the champagne corks.

But last week Iranian officials backtracked on the agreement reached in Vienna to send three-quarters of its nuclear material to Russia for processing, after which it would be returned. Some 2,600 pounds of uranium was to be shipped by mid-January.

The pact was supposed to give the U.S. a year of extra time to work its negotiating magic on the Islamist terror state, as well as hold off an attack by Israel on Iran’s nuclear facilities. …

Iran now wants to keep its uranium until it gets fuel from the West. And this change of mind comes right after dubiously re-elected Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared: “We welcome cooperation on nuclear fuel, power plants and technology, and we are ready to cooperate.” …

Even if the Vienna deal had stuck, it makes a mockery of three U.N. Security Council declarations by legitimizing Tehran’s violations of the U.N. and allowing this fanatical, terrorist-supporting regime to continue its “peaceful” nuclear program. …

How can a theocratic government with a stone-age worldview take the most sophisticated, modern, industrialized nation in the world for a ride, as if we just fell off the turnip truck?

Because those who run Iran realize they are engaged in a global war. Those who now run American foreign policy, on the other hand, think “war on terror” is passe. Peace must be given a chance first, they think. And “yes, we can” make it work, without firing a shot. Hope will triumph. …

Think? Those who now run American foreign policy think?

Does this burble (from The Times of India) by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – delivered in Pakistan on Friday  when Iran said  ‘no’ – sound like thinking?

“We are working to determine exactly what they are willing to do, whether this was an initial response that is an end response or the beginning of getting to where we expect them to end up,” Clinton said.

The New York Times journalist David Rohde was captured and held by the Taliban for 7 months and 10 days, and finally escaped. He tells his story here.

An extract:

Over those months, I came to a simple realization. After seven years of reporting in the region, I did not fully understand how extreme many of the Taliban had become. Before the kidnapping, I viewed the organization as a form of “Al Qaeda lite,” a religiously motivated movement primarily focused on controlling Afghanistan.

Living side by side with the Haqqanis’ followers, I learned that the goal of the hard-line Taliban was far more ambitious. Contact with foreign militants in the tribal areas appeared to have deeply affected many young Taliban fighters. They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with Al Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world.

As Cliff May points out in a Townhall  article discussing Rohde’s story here, ‘Though groups such as the Taliban — as well Hezbollah and Hamas — may fight locally, their leaders have always thought globally, viewing their struggles as part of a broader War Against the West.’  We would add, ‘and against the whole of the non-Muslim world’.

Rohde goes on:

I had written about the ties between Pakistan’s intelligence services and the Taliban while covering the region for The New York Times. I knew Pakistan turned a blind eye to many of their activities. But I was astonished by what I encountered firsthand: a Taliban mini-state that flourished openly and with impunity.

The Taliban government that had supposedly been eliminated by the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was alive and thriving.

All along the main roads in North and South Waziristan, Pakistani government outposts had been abandoned, replaced by Taliban checkpoints where young militants detained anyone lacking a Kalashnikov rifle and the right Taliban password. We heard explosions echo across North Waziristan as my guards and other Taliban fighters learned how to make roadside bombs that killed American and NATO troops.

And I found the tribal areas — widely perceived as impoverished and isolated — to have superior roads, electricity and infrastructure compared with what exists in much of Afghanistan. …

As the months dragged on, I grew to detest our captors. I saw the Haqqanis as a criminal gang masquerading as a pious religious movement. They described themselves as the true followers of Islam but displayed an astounding capacity for dishonesty and greed.

Why did he not understand how extreme the Taliban ‘had become’ when millions of us who have never set foot in Afghanistan know how extreme they have always been?

That ‘but’ of his in the last sentence  gives the answer  – and may evoke sardonic laughter.

Remember, though, that this is a New York Times journalist we are talking about. There are many facts about the world we live in, well known to the rest of us, that must come as a surprise to NYT writers, editors, and loyal readers, if forcibly impressed on their consciousness at last by extraordinary circumstances.

While politicians in Western democracies, or at least in Britain and the US, interrogate their consciences over how much physical and mental pressure they may allow their agents to use on captured terrorists to elicit vital security information, they choose to overlook the practice of torture in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Gaza, the West Bank …

The West Bank? There Britain has suddenly to take heed of  what the following report calls ‘a wave of torture’  because Britain is the paymaster of the torturers.  The Mail on Sunday is to be commended for exposing the facts, but calling it a ‘wave’ that has been going on for ‘the past two years’ implies that the practice is unusual, when in truth, as the British Foreign Office knows perfectly well, it is prevalent and customary.

From the MailOnline:

The Government is sending British police and intelligence officers to the West Bank to try to stop a wave of brutal torture by Palestinian security forces funded by UK taxpayers.

Their mission is to set up and train a new ‘internal affairs’ department with sweeping powers to investigate abuse and bring torturers to justice.

The department is being paid for by Britain, with an initial planning budget of £100,000 – a sum set to soar as it becomes established.

Yesterday a senior official from the semi-autonomous Palestinian Authority (PA), which runs the West Bank and its security agencies, admitted for the first time that torture, beatings and extra-judicial killings have been rife for the past two years, with hundreds of torture allegations and at least four murders in custody, the most recent in August. …

Support for the new department follows the disclosure by The Mail on Sunday in January that Britain spends £20million a year funding the forces responsible for the abuse.

Most of their victims are accused of involvement with Hamas, the radical Islamist party that seized power through violence in the Gaza Strip in 2007. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank is controlled by the rival Fatah party.

Fatah and Hamas are both terrorist organizations. Britain gives millions to Hamas too – though strictly, of course, for ‘humanitarian aid’.

As if money were not fungible!

Obama’s effect as Commander-in-Chief is the profound – and ultimately incapacitating? –  demoralization of the troops in Afghanistan.

He doesn’t know what they’re fighting for, so neither do they.  Some (including General McChrystal) think that their mission is ‘to help Afghanistan’. But the people of Aghanistan didn’t ask for their help and don’t seem to want it.

From The Times (London):

American soldiers serving in Afghanistan are depressed and deeply disillusioned, according to the chaplains of two US battalions that have spent nine months on the front line in the war against the Taleban. Many feel that they are risking their lives — and that colleagues have died — for a futile mission and an Afghan population that does nothing to help them, the chaplains told The Times in their makeshift chapel on this fortress-like base in a dusty, brown valley southwest of Kabul.

“The many soldiers who come to see us have a sense of futility and anger about being here. They are really in a state of depression and despair and just want to get back to their families,” said Captain Jeff Masengale, of the 10th Mountain Division’s 2-87 Infantry Battalion. “They feel they are risking their lives for progress that’s hard to discern,” said Captain Sam Rico, of the Division’s 4-25 Field Artillery Battalion. “They are tired, strained, confused and just want to get through.” The chaplains said that they were speaking out because the men could not. …

Several men approached by The Times, however, readily admitted that their morale had slumped. “We’re lost — that’s how I feel. I’m not exactly sure why we’re here,” said Specialist Raquime Mercer, 20, whose closest friend was shot dead by a renegade Afghan policeman last Friday. “I need a clear-cut purpose if I’m going to get hurt out here or if I’m going to die.”

Sergeant Christopher Hughes, 37, from Detroit, has lost six colleagues and survived two roadside bombs. Asked if the mission was worthwhile, he replied: “If I knew exactly what the mission was, probably so, but I don’t.” The only soldiers who thought it was going well “work in an office, not on the ground”. In his opinion “the whole country is going to s***”.

The battalion’s 1,500 soldiers are nine months in to a year-long deployment that has proved extraordinarily tough. Their goal was to secure the mountainous Wardak province and then to win the people’s allegiance through development and good governance. They have, instead, found themselves locked in an increasingly vicious battle with the Taleban.

They have been targeted by at least 300 roadside bombs, about 180 of which have exploded. Nineteen men have been killed in action, with another committing suicide. About a hundred have been flown home with amputations, severe burns and other injuries likely to cause permanent disability, and many of those have not been replaced. More than two dozen mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles (MRAPs) have been knocked out of action. …

Most of the men are on their second, third or fourth tours of Afghanistan and Iraq, with barely a year between each. Staff Sergeant Erika Cheney, Airborne’s mental health specialist, expressed concern about their mental state — especially those in scattered outposts … “They’re tired, frustrated, scared. A lot of them are afraid to go out but will still go,” she said. …

The men are frustrated by the lack of obvious purpose or progress. “The soldiers’ biggest question is: what can we do to make this war stop. Catch one person? Assault one objective? Soldiers want definite answers, other than to stop the Taleban, because that almost seems impossible. It’s hard to catch someone you can’t see,” said Specialist Mercer.

“It’s a very frustrating mission,” said Lieutenant Hjelmstad. “The average soldier sees a friend blown up and his instinct is to retaliate or believe it’s for something [worthwhile], but it’s not like other wars where your buddy died but they took the hill. There’s no tangible reward for the sacrifice. It’s hard to say Wardak is better than when we got here.”

Captain Masengale, a soldier for 12 years before he became a chaplain, said: “We want to believe in a cause but we don’t know what that cause is.”

The soldiers are angry that colleagues are losing their lives while trying to help a population that will not help them. “You give them all the humanitarian assistance that they want and they’re still going to lie to you. They’ll tell you there’s no Taleban anywhere in the area and as soon as you roll away, ten feet from their house, you get shot at again,” said Specialist Eric Petty, from Georgia.

Captain Rico told of the disgust of a medic who was asked to treat an insurgent shortly after pulling a colleague’s charred corpse from a bombed vehicle.

The soldiers complain that rules of engagement designed to minimise civilian casualties mean that they fight with one arm tied behind their backs. “They’re a joke,” said one. “You get shot at but can do nothing about it. You have to see the person with the weapon. It’s not enough to know which house the shooting’s coming from.”

The soldiers joke that their Isaf arm badges stand not for International Security Assistance Force but “I Suck At Fighting” or “I Support Afghan Farmers”.

To compound matters, soldiers are mainly being killed not in combat but on routine journeys, by roadside bombs planted by an invisible enemy. “That’s very demoralising,” said Captain Masengale. …

The chaplains said that many soldiers had lost their desire to help Afghanistan. …

The excellent Diana West writes at Townhall:

When it comes to Afghanistan, what separates President Barack Obama and Gen. Stanley McChrystal?

Not much. Neither wants to destroy the Taliban — just tamp it down to the point where an as-yet non-existent Afghan state can function. Which is why — prediction time — McChrystal won’t quit when Obama gives him fewer forces than McChrystal is asking for.

McChrystal’s assessment frankly states that what the general calls his “new strategy” — an intensification of “population protection” at the expense of “force protection” — is his top priority, not increased troop levels. But this strategy is ignored in the debate, and certainly by most conservatives, who only emphasize the need to “give the general the forces he needs to win.” What it is that McChrystal actually wants to win — namely, the support of the Afghan people — is rarely mentioned.

And how to win that Afghan support? The man has a plan. It amounts to a taxpayer-funded, military-implemented bribery scheme. As the New York Times’ Dexter Filkins recently put it: “McChrystal’s plan is a blueprint for an extensive American commitment to build a modern state in Afghanistan, where one has never existed. … Even under the best of circumstances, this effort would most likely last many more years, cost hundreds of billions of dollars and entail the deaths of many more American women and men. And that’s if it succeeds. “

In other words, the Afghan “surge” under consideration is for “nation-building,” not war-making. But guess what? The United States of America already tried building a modern state in Afghanistan — or, at least, building a state of modernity in Afghanistan — and it just didn’t stick. And this was no fly-by-night operation. University of Indiana professor Nick Cullather describes the 30-plus years of sustained U.S. development in Afghanistan as “an `integrated’ development scheme, with education, industry, agriculture, medicine, and marketing under a single controlling authority” — a massive dam project known as the Helmand Valley Authority. As historian Arnold Toynbee observed in 1960: “The domain of the Helmand Valley Authority has become a piece of America inserted into the Afghan landscape.” And from the project’s beginning in 1946 — designed by Morrison Knudson, builder of Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge and Cape Canaveral — to 1979 when it ended, there was no Taliban “insurgency” complicating the social work of nation-building.

But this crucial episode of U.S.-Afghan history has been erased from national consciousness, pricked only by the odd remember-when news story. Of course, these historic U.S. efforts in Helmand Province — the Taliban-spawning, opium region into which 4,000 U.S. Marines “surged” this summer — have themselves been erased from Afghanistan, which may explain the amnesia.

Still, for nation-building utopians such as Gen. McChrystal, those from Left to Right who see different peoples and cultures as interchangeable markers on a game board, reality never tempers the fanaticism. A blind faith empowers believers both to see their utopian visions and to block out the reasons they can never materialize — in this case, the specifically Islamic reasons (Sharia) Afghanistan can neither serve nor fulfill Western ends. …

Here lies the fatal flaw in our strategy. … The United States and its Western allies ignore the threat of jihad … “We miniaturize the challenge,” writes Andrew C. McCarthy at National Review Online. “Thus, the war is said only to be in Afghanistan. The ‘challenge’ is framed as isolating a relative handful (of extremists) rather than confronting the fact that tens of millions of Muslims despise the West.” And even worse, the fact that tens of millions of Muslims work to assuage their feelings by following and imposing Islamic law across the West.

In other words, nation-building in the Islamic world is a distraction from nation-saving in the Western one.

The left passionately desires to reduce the First World to the level of the Third World and destroy the nation state. That is the ideal in the minds of Obama and his henchmen, and it explains his foreign policy.

It is the ideal of the British Labour Party. Throughout their long years in power, that socialist cabal worked to achieve the destruction of Britain, and they have succeeded to such a degree that the damage is probably irreversible. They’ve done it by admitting Third World immigrants in massive numbers.

Melanie Phillips writes:

So now the cat is well and truly out of the bag. For years, as the number of immigrants to Britain shot up apparently uncontrollably, the question was how exactly this had happened.

Was it through a fit of absent-mindedness or gross incompetence? Or was it not inadvertent at all, but deliberate?

The latter explanation seemed just too outrageous. After all, a deliberate policy of mass immigration would have amounted to nothing less than an attempt to change the very make-up of this country without telling the electorate.

There could not have been a more grave abuse of the entire democratic process. Now, however, we learn that this is exactly what did happen. The Labour government has been engaged upon a deliberate and secret policy of national cultural sabotage.

This astonishing revelation surfaced quite casually last weekend in a newspaper article by one Andrew Neather. He turns out to have been a speech writer for Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.

And it was he who wrote a landmark speech in September 2000 by the then immigration minister, Barbara Roche, that called for a loosening of immigration controls. But the true scope and purpose of this new policy was actively concealed.

In its 1997 election manifesto, Labour promised ‘firm control over immigration’ and in 2005 it promised a ‘crackdown on abuse’. In 2001, its manifesto merely said that the immigration rules needed to reflect changes to the economy to meet skills shortages.

But all this concealed a monumental shift of policy. For Neather wrote that until ‘at least February last year’, when a new points-based system was introduced to limit foreign workers in response to increasing uproar, the purpose of the policy Roche ushered in was to open up the UK to mass immigration.

This has been achieved. Some 2.3million migrants have been added to the population since 2001. Since 1997, the number of work permits has quadrupled to 120,000 a year.

Unless policies change, over the next 25 years some seven million more will be added to Britain’s population, a rate of growth three times as fast as took place in the Eighties.

Such an increase is simply unsustainable. Britain is already one of the most overcrowded countries in Europe. But now look at the real reason why this policy was introduced, and in secret. The Government’s ‘driving political purpose’, wrote Neather, was ‘to make the UK truly multicultural’.

It was therefore a politically motivated attempt by ministers to transform the fundamental make-up and identity of this country. It was done to destroy the right of the British people to live in a society defined by a common history, religion, law, language and traditions.

It was done to destroy for ever what it means to be culturally British and to put another ‘multicultural’ identity in its place. And it was done without telling or asking the British people whether they wanted their country and their culture to be transformed in this way.

Spitefully, one motivation by Labour ministers was ‘to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.

Even Neather found that particular element of gratuitous Left-wing bullying to be ‘a manoeuvre too far’.

Yet apart from this, Neather sees nothing wrong in the policy he has described. Indeed, the reason for his astonishing candour is he thinks it’s something to boast about. Mass immigration, he wrote, had provided the ‘foreign nannies, cleaners and gardeners’ without whom London could hardly function.

What elitist arrogance! As if most people employ nannies, cleaners and gardeners. And what ignorance. The argument that Britain is better off with this level of immigration has been conclusively shown to be economically illiterate.

Neather gave the impression that most immigrants are Eastern Europeans. But these form fewer than a quarter of all immigrants. [Most are Muslim – JB]

And the fact is that, despite his blithe assertions to the contrary, schools in areas of very high immigration find it desperately difficult to cope with so many children who don’t even have basic English. Other services, such as health or housing, are similarly being overwhelmed by the sheer weight of numbers.

But the most shattering revelation was that this policy of mass immigration was not introduced to produce nannies or cleaners for the likes of Neather. It was to destroy Britain’s identity and transform it into a multicultural society where British attributes would have no greater status than any other country’s.

A measure of immigration is indeed good for a country. But this policy was not to enhance British culture and society by broadening the mix. It was to destroy its defining character altogether. …

They were, he wrote, reluctant to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all to Labour’s core white working class vote. So they deliberately kept it secret.

They knew that if they told the truth about what they were doing, voters would rise up in protest. So they kept it out of their election manifestos. …

For years [Britons] have watched as their country’s landscape has been transformed out of all recognition — and that politicians from all mainstream parties have told them first that it isn’t happening and second, that they are racist bigots to object even if it is.

Now the political picture has been transformed overnight by the unguarded candour of Andrew Neather’s eye-opening superciliousness. For now we know that Labour politicians actually caused this to happen – and did so out of total contempt for their own core voters. …

One of our readers, Hawk2, has commented on our post below, Question, providing the sort of answer we are looking for.

We think his/her comments are so interesting that we are posting them in full here on our front page.

US foreign policy should be grounded in two essential considerations, and only these two:

1. Profitable trade

2. National security

With these in mind, the only recent war that must be seen to have had no justification whatsoever is President Clinton’s war in the Balkans. It did nothing for trade. It gained America nothing. It was not worth what it cost. What is worse, its rationale was the protection of Muslim rebels, at a time when Islam was fast becoming the major enemy of the Western world.

Oil is a very good reason to go to war. It satisfies both considerations. If the US had gone to war to seize the Saudi Arabian oilfields in 1974 when the price of oil was hyped as an attack on the US economy, it would have been right to do so.

If the wars against Saddam Hussein were waged for oil, they were necessary and worth what they cost. Also if they were waged to protect America from WMD, they were necessary and worth what they cost. If, on the other hand, they were waged to protect Kuwait from conquest, or Iraqis from tyranny, they were unnecessary and not worth what they cost.

The war against the Taliban/al-Qaeda was justified by 9/11. But having soundly beaten the Taliban, the US should have withdrawn, leaving a clear message that if the US were struck again the Taliban would be beaten again. Staying on to build schools and clinics which the Taliban will demolish is senseless, and not worth what it costs. There is no saving the Afghans from themselves: from corruption, the subjugation of women, the growing of opium.

As to the argument that it is always in the interests of the US to protect freedom in the wider world, that is true, but the threat to freedom must be a real one. It was why America was right to go to Europe’s aid in the in the First and Second World Wars. It may be a reason for America to go to war again. America’s own freedom was under threat then as it is now, this time by the creeping colonization of Europe by Islam. ‘Spreading democracy’ – another reason given for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – does not guarantee the spread of freedom. Germany was a democracy when Hitler came to power by being democratically elected. Zalaya was democratically elected in Honduras, and was deposed because he was trying to establish his dictatorship. But the State Department insists that he should be reinstated. This is staggeringly stupid if not treacherous. The preservation of freedom on the South American continent wherever it exists is plainly essential to US security. Hostile regimes in the hemisphere are a serious threat, as Hugo Chavez proves by his alliance with would-be-nuclear-armed Iran.

This reasoning would fully justify an immediate military attack on Iran and North Korea.

It ‘s not surprising but it is exasperating that Obama is now laying gifts at the feet of Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the blood-soaked criminal who rules over the Sudan.

Jonathan Tobin writes:

Now the chief liberal icon of the moment [Barack Obama] has taken his philosophy of “engagement” with dictators to the next level by a policy of outreach to the government that the United States has accused of genocide in Darfur. On Monday, after months of internal arguments about the best way to deal with Sudan, the administration announced it would reward the country’s murderous dictator, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir — a man currently under indictment by the International Criminal Court for his role in directing the murder of hundreds of thousands of people — with economic incentives to try and bribe him to stop behaving in such a beastly fashion.

The idea of appeasing al-Bashir was enough to give even the Obama cheerleading squad at the New York Times editorial page pause; it demurred from its usual unflinching support to express a degree of skepticism about the idea that lifting sanctions will change the behavior of this rogue regime or cause it to no longer grant safe haven for terrorists. While this switch from sanctions to engagement fits in with the Obama foreign-policy template, can the same people who were appalled by Bush’s failure to act be persuaded that al-Bashir can be charmed into abandoning genocide?

What needs to be done is the total destruction of  the Janjaweed – the Arab Muslim terrorist bands who are killing, torturing, raping, and despoiling their non-Arab Muslim compatriots – and the execution of al-Bashir.

The question is, should America do it ?

It goes without saying that the actual leader America has now would never consider doing anything of the sort, but what is the answer in principle?

Should America use force abroad only where American interests need defending?

Or does the single superpower in the world, one that possesses the economic and military strength to intervene effectively and has a tradition of aiding other peoples in critical times, have a perpetual moral responsibility to save and protect the victims of tyrannous oppression?

Or at least to prevent genocide?

Or is the defense of freedom always in America’s interest?

Here is part of a story from the Washington Post. (Note the PC use of ‘paramilitary’ instead of ‘terrorist’. By the up-side down values of the left, terrorists must be treated with respect.)

U.S. and European counterterrorism officials say a rising number of Western recruits — including Americans — are traveling to Afghanistan and Pakistan to attend paramilitary training camps. The flow of recruits has continued unabated, officials said, in spite of an intensified campaign over the past year by the CIA to eliminate al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders in drone missile attacks.

Since January, at least 30 recruits from Germany have traveled to Pakistan for training, according to German security sources. About 10 people — not necessarily the same individuals — have returned to Germany this year, fueling concerns that fresh plots are in the works against European targets.

“We think this is sufficient to show how serious the threat is,” said a senior German counterterrorism official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

German security services have been on high alert since last month, when groups affiliated with the Taliban and al-Qaeda issued several videos warning that an attack on German targets was imminent if the government did not bring home its forces from Afghanistan.

There are about 3,800 German troops in the country, the third-largest NATO contingent after those of the United States and Britain. German officials say Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders are trying to exploit domestic opposition in Germany to the war; surveys show that a majority of German voters favor a withdrawal of their soldiers.

The videos all featured German speakers who urged Muslims to travel to Afghanistan and Pakistan to join their cause.

“They’re doing such good business that they are dropping a new video every week or so,” said Ronald Sandee, a former Dutch military intelligence officer who serves as research director of the NEFA Foundation, a U.S. group that monitors terrorist networks. “If I were a young Muslim, I’d find them very convincing.”

Last week, German officials disclosed that a 10-member cell from Hamburg had left for Pakistan earlier this year. The cell is allegedly led by a German of Syrian descent but also includes ethnic Turks, German converts to Islam and one member with Afghan roots.

Other European countries are also struggling to keep their citizens from going to Pakistan for paramilitary training.

In August, Pakistani officials arrested a group of 12 foreigners headed to North Waziristan, a tribal region near the Afghan border where many of the camps are located. Among those arrested were four Swedes, including Mehdi Ghezali, a former inmate of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay …

They shouldn’t have been let into Europe, they shouldn’t have been given citizenship. European states should be glad to let them all go, including the converts who are of European descent. They should never be let back in again. It’s when they return that they are most dangerous, not when they stay in North Waziristan. The treacherous immigrants who seek terrorist training out there should have their families sent after them.