Nidal Malik Hasan, the Muslim terrorist of Fort Hood, had openly advocated the decapitation of non-Muslims, the pouring of boiling oil down their throats.

Not nice, some of his superiors thought. But it was only because of his religion, they deemed, and his religious zeal must not, in the name of diversity and political correctness, be regarded as any worse or more threatening than anyone else’s – a Christian’s, say, or a Buddhist’s, or a Hindu’s. Let it pass, they decided. Do nothing about it.

They were more ‘concerned’ that he was a ‘mediocre student  and lazy worker’. Yet he got his qualification. No doubt affirmative action saw to that, the policy that chooses the ineligible and promotes the worst above the best; the mindset that has saddled America with an ignorant and incompetent president.

From Yahoo! news:

A group of doctors [at least some of them psychiatrists, presumably – JB] overseeing Nidal Malik Hasan’s medical training discussed concerns about his overly zealous religious views and strange behavior months before the Army major was accused of opening fire on soldiers and civilians at Fort Hood, Texas.

Doctors and staff overseeing Hasan’s training viewed him at times as belligerent, defensive and argumentative in his frequent discussions of his Muslim faith …

As a psychiatrist in training, Hasan was characterized in meetings as a mediocre student and lazy worker, a matter of concern among the doctors and staff at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences military medical school, the official said. …

The group saw no evidence that Hasan, 39, was violent or a threat. It was more that he repeatedly referred to his strong religious views in discussions with classmates, his superiors and even in his research work, the official said. His behavior, while at times perceived as intense and combative, was not unlike the zeal of others with strong religious views, and some doctors and staff were concerned that their unfamiliarity with the Muslim faith would lead them to unfairly single out Hasan’s behavior, the official said.

Then why, dammit, did they not make themselves familiar with the Muslim faith?

Why don’t those who repeatedly intone that Islam is ‘a religion of peace’ go and read the Koran and the hadith? No one who’s read them can seriously hold that opinion.

Why don’t those who think Islam is just another religion, and that having Muslims in the armed forces is necessary for ‘diversity’, inform themselves as to what exactly Muhammad taught his followers?

They would quickly discover that Islam is an atrocious, destructive, cruel, murderous ideology. It is past time that the military authorities, teachers, journalists, media pundits, Christian and other religious leaders, law-makers, and indeed all who can read take the trouble to find out what this barbaric enemy coming at us out of the far past believes, plans, and intends.

The Berlin Wall was not defensive. It was built by the Communists to keep their serf populations from escaping. As Europe celebrates its fall, a Muslim, Shiraz Maher, writes in Standpoint about barrier walls built by Islamic states, never noticed by those who vituperatively condemn the defensive barrier Israel has erected against suicide bombers and other terrorist attackers:

Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. During that time scores of other barriers and walls have gone up around the world …

Of course, the one we’ve all heard about is the Israeli security fence which attracted fierce criticism after its construction in 2003. Built in response to the Palestinian intifada which claimed more than 900 lives since September 2000, the fence has dramatically halted the number of terrorist attacks inside the country.

Excuse the pun  but from the wall-to-wall coverage it received  you could be mistaken for thinking that Israel’s decision to defend itself in this way was unprecedented. Yet, not only is this wrong but, ironically, a lot of the physical barriers currently in place are located in the ‘Muslim world’.

The Saudi-Yemeni border is just one place where a physical barrier is used by a Muslim regime to defend itself against ‘smuggling’ and ‘terrorism’. … Saudi Arabia’s border with Yemen has always been problematic, providing a trafficking route for weapons smuggling. Indeed, the explosives used in the 2003 Riyadh bombings which targeted compounds housing western expatriates were blamed on Yemeni smugglers. It was not the first time Saudi Arabia blamed the Yemenis for not doing enough to stop terrorism. Yemeni smugglers are also believed to have helped facilitate the bombing campaign against US military bases in the mid-1990s.

Once the Saudi government lost confidence in Yemen’s ability to curb domestic terrorism, they decided to build a physical barrier. Much of it runs through contested territory. According to the 2000 Jeddah border treaty between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, a demilitarised ‘buffer zone’ should exist between both countries, protecting the rights of nomadic Bedouin tribes which live in the cross-border area. Yet, parts of the Saudi barrier stand inside the demilitarised zone, violating the 2000 agreement and infuriating Yemen. …

More recently, Saudi Arabia has also built a physical barrier along its border with Iraq to stop jihadists from the Kingdom going over to join the mujahideen. …

Beyond the Middle East, Iran’s 900 km border with Pakistan is currently being replaced by a concrete wall (10 feet high, 3 feet thick), fortified with steel rods. Ostensibly built to thwart drug traffickers and terrorists, the local Baloch people oppose its construction as it cuts across their land and separates communities living on either side of the divide. The opposition leader of Balochistan’s Provincial Assembley, Kachkol Ali, has bitterly opposed the wall saying his people were never consulted about it and that it cuts off families from one another. … A number of Baloch communities, particularly in the Kech district of south-western Balochistan, straddle the Iranian-Pakistani border area. After Iran began construction of its wall, many of those residing on its side were forced back across the border into Pakistan where they are separated from their families and land. …

There are plenty more examples of this within the Muslim world too. In the Western Sahara desert Morocco has built a massive wall, spanning more than 2700 km. Its primary aim is to guard against Sahrawi separatists who organised themselves into the Polisario Front – a political and terrorist movement – which seeks independence for the Sahrawi people. Much of the wall is lined with barbed wire and landmines, which is something it shares in common with parts of the Pakistan-Indian border (particularly in Kashmir).

Twenty years on from the collapse of the Berlin Wall physical barriers continue to be employed around the world. They may not be pretty, but they are effective. Indeed, even Israel’s biggest critics would have to concede that suicide bombings have fallen away sharply ever since the construction of the security fence in parts of Gaza and the West Bank. Yet, Islamists and parts of the political left obsess only about Israel but do not extend similar condemnation to Iran, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, or Pakistan. …

From Newsmax:

Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, tells Newsmax that the White House intervened to keep him from obtaining critical information regarding the Fort Hood murders. …

Rep. Hoekstra charged in a statement on Monday that the Obama administration was withholding information and demanded that the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the Director of National Intelligence preserve documents relating to the incident for use in any future investigation.

“On Friday afternoon I asked the director of national intelligence [Dennis Blair] to get a briefing,” Hoekstra said. “We were already starting to hear that Major Hasan had some connection back to the Middle East, perhaps some jihadist link, and I just asked the DNI: Would you share with me the information you have available at this time?

“He indicated that he would give me a call back and let me know. He contacted me on Saturday and said, I think we’re going to make this work. A couple of hours later he called back and said, between the lines, I’ve been overruled by the White House. There will be no briefing for you this weekend, and early next week on Tuesday we’ll give you a briefing.

“Well, there was no reason why we couldn’t be briefed on the information they had at that time. I get suspicious when they don’t give us the information that we’re looking for, especially when they’re going to give it to us in a very limited form, perhaps only to me and the chairman of the whole committee. That’s when my suspicions were raised.

“Now [Monday] night they did come back and brief my staff and some senators on what they knew about Major Hasan and when they knew it, but it was already after most of this information had somehow been leaked to the media.”

As to why the administration might want to withhold information, Hoekstra said: “There are serious questions about whether the FBI did everything appropriately and whether there was enough information out there, enough red flags out there, that reasonable people would have assumed Hasan should have been more closely evaluated than he was.

“I don’t know if that’s it or not, and I won’t know or have a better idea until I’ve had access to all the information…

“I’ve just made it very clear that I want them to preserve all the documents, all the information that deals with Major Hasan, because I want to make sure that we don’t get to a point where, well, we can’t find that information anymore. I want a full, thorough investigation. …

“You need to put together the whole picture. The whole picture is that it appears he had contact with overseas jihadists, including perhaps people connected with al-Qaida. He made presentations and statements to his colleagues here in the United States that would lead one to believe he might have jihadist tendencies.

“Did all of this information ever collect in one place and give us a thorough insight into who he was? Or did the intelligence community have part of it, the Army have part of it, and was it stored in three or four different places so that it never came together to provide one coherent picture of who Hasan might be and who he might become?”

Asked why the Army did not act against Hasan based on the information it reportedly had, Hoekstra said “what we have seen during this administration is a certain political correctness that just makes many of us uncomfortable. 

“It was only a few months ago that the secretary of homeland security said we’re not going to use the term ‘terrorism’ anymore. We’re going to call it ‘manmade disasters.’

“The bottom line here is that if we are unwilling to call terrorism terrorism, we will never be able to deal with it, confront it, contain it, and defeat it.”

Mark Steyn repeats a column he wrote seven years ago about the Washington, D.C. sniper Muslim terrorist, John Allen Muhammad – who, we are happy to inform our readers, is to be executed today. Mark Steyn rightly observes that what he wrote then serves as apt comment on the recent Fort Hood murders by a Muslim terrorist:

Broadly speaking, in these interesting times, when something unusual and unprecedented happens, there are those who think on balance it’s more likely to be a fellow called Mohammed than, say, Bud, and there are those who climb into the metaphorical burqa, close up the grille and insist, despite all the evidence, that we should be looking for some angry white male. I’m in the former camp and, apropos the sniper, said as much in the Telegraph’s American sister papers. I had a bet with both my wife and my assistant that the perp would be an Islamic terrorist. The gals, unfortunately, had made the mistake of reading The New York Times, whose experts concluded it would be a “macho hunter” or an “icy loner”.

Speaking as a macho hunter and an icy loner myself, I’m beginning to think the media would be better off turning their psychological profilers loose on America’s newsrooms. Take, for example, the Times’s star columnist Frank Rich. Within a few weeks of September 11, he was berating John Ashcroft, the Attorney-General, for not rounding up America’s “home-grown Talibans” – the religious Right and “the anti-abortion terrorist movement”. In a column entitled “How to Lose a War” last October he mocked the administration for not consulting with abortion clinics, who had a lot of experience dealing with “terrorists”.

You get the picture: sure, Muslim fundamentalists can be pretty extreme, but what about all our Christian fundamentalists? Unfortunately, for the old moral equivalence to hold up, the Christians really need to get off their fundamentalist butts and start killing more people. At the moment, the brilliantly versatile Muslim fundamentalists are gunning down Maryland schoolkids and bus drivers, hijacking Moscow theatres, self-detonating in Israeli pizza parlours, blowing up French oil tankers in Yemen, and slaughtering nightclubbers in Bali, while Christian fundamentalists are, er, sounding extremely strident in their calls for the return of prayer in school.

John Allen Muhammad had been a soldier in the US army, as John Allen Williams, before he converted to Islam. Nidal Hasan was a Muslim when he joined the army. After coming under suspicion as a subversive, he was promoted, incredibly, to the rank of major. (Almost as incredibly, he was a psychiatrist. Considering that ‘Islam’ means submission, and psychiatry questions and probes thought and feeling, an ‘Islamic psychiatrist’ would seem to be something of an oxymoron.)

We have said that Muslims should not be allowed to serve in the armed forces. The exclusion could be enforced  politely by telling Muslims that as they belong to ‘the Religion of Peace’, they are not required to serve. They can be excused from military service, like Quakers and other conscientious objectors.

Seems to us the lesson to be learnt is that the army should ideally consist of nothing but insensitive, aggressive, conservative, heterosexual, arrogantly patriotic men. ‘Male chauvinist pigs’, if you like. Highly disciplined, but fierce. They could bother God or any number of gods to their hearts’ content, only not Allah. We atheists would positively recommend to any of those brave brutes who need to believe in supernatural powers that they revive Mithraism, the rude, rough, bloody cult of the Roman army. It would be entirely suitable.

Such an army is at present a pipe dream. It is unlikely to be raised in this era. Elsewhere, Mark Steyn writes of ‘the collapse of confidence’ of the West at the same time as the Berlin Wall collapsed. He speaks of the ‘enervation of the West’. We would also call it the feminization of the West. What hope do we have of recovering?

Yesterday the fall of the Berlin Wall was celebrated in Germany. The fall of the wall marked the beginning of the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. As tens of thousands of people poured through the opened gates into West Berlin twenty years ago, the atrocious creed of Communism itself was visibly exposed as the enemy of the human spirit. Chief among the causes of the fall was the resolute opposition to Communist tyranny by the United States. But  – Oh, the painful ironies of history! – who was it who stood and spoke yesterday in Berlin as representative of the United States? Hillary Clinton, disciple of the Communist revolutionary Saul Alinsky, who had wanted to turn America into the very same hell that East Germany had been!

From an IBD editorial:

The Fort Hood terrorist is … just one of many examples of jihadist traitors in the ranks of the military. Together they form a dangerous Fifth Column, and the Pentagon — thanks to institutionalized political correctness — is doing next to nothing to root them out.

Instead, brass are actively recruiting Muslim soldiers — whose ranks have swelled to more than 15,000 — and catering to their faith by erecting mosques even at Marine headquarters in Quantico, Va. More, they’re hiring Muslim chaplains endorsed by radical Islamic front groups, who convert and radicalize soldiers.

In the wake of the worst domestic military-base massacre in U.S. history, this is an outrage to say the least. And the PC blinders explain how Fort Hood commanders could have failed so horrifically in protecting their force from the internal threat there. …

Islam is the enemy of the United States. No Muslim should be allowed to serve in the US armed forces.

Nidal Malik Hasan, the army officer who yesterday massacred his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, is a MUSLIM TERRORIST.

He should have been recognized as a potential terrorist, removed from the army, and watched.

All the warning signs were there. He is a Muslim who advertised his identity as such by wearing traditional Muslim clothing off base. He  defended suicide bombing. Though born in Virginia, he had his nationality recorded as Palestinian because his parents were Jordanians of Palestinian origin (as most Jordanians are, Jordan being the British-established Palestinian Arab state). He vociferously objected to being deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan. He had been reported to ‘channels’ for raging against America’s wars on Muslim enemies.

Yet  ‘channels’ apparently turned a deaf ear,  because it would have been politically incorrect to take all this into account and act on the information.

The result of this absurd timidity imposed by a stupid ideology is 12 dead (by today’s count) and many more wounded.

David Horowitz sees the case as we do:

A Muslim fanatic with an Internet site praising Islamic suicide bombers as defenders of their comrades is a Major in the U.S. Army with access to military intelligence and lethal weaponry. And it’s not as though the army didn’t know that he was a Muslim fanatic and supporter of the Islamic jihad against the West. He was under investigation for six months because of his anti-American, jihadist rantings. He did not want to be deployed. He wanted to be discharged.

But despite his identification with America’s enemies, the army kept him in its officer corps. How in God’s name was this possible? But it was. And so, after calling America the “aggressor” in Afghanistan and Iraq this Muslim jihadist traitor army officer picks up his semi-automatic weapons and heads for the center at Ft. Hood where soldiers are being deployed to fight the jihadists in Afghanistan to conduct his massacre. Yet this morning the Fox News Channel chiron says “Investigators search for a motive in the Ft. Hood killings.” Is everybody out of their mind?

The Ft. Hood killings are the chickens of the left coming home to roost. … The fifth column formed out of the unholy alliance between radical Islam and the American left is now entrenched in the White House and throughout our government. And in matters like the Muslim jihadist Major Hasan our military is its captive.

The Fort Hood massacre is the first of the preventable atrocities we have been warning about on our websites since 9/11 — the atrocities which are apparently necessary for Americans to wake up to the threat that confronts us. We have a vast internal threat in this country in the form of this unholy alliance between the anti-American Left and radical Islam – whose Muslim Brotherhood network extends through our universities, our government and our military. It is “politically incorrect” to recognize this fact. You can be barred — as I have been — from speaking at universities for even talking about it. The embargo of discussion of the Islamo-fascist threat puts every American (including the infidel collaborators) at risk. …

Five British soldiers were shot dead Tuesday by an Afghan ‘policeman’ they were training.

An unnamed soldier contributed this to The Independent:

When I heard the news this morning, I thought “Christ, five in one go…” I was shocked and saddened – but I was not surprised that it had happened. I’m surprised it took this long.

We went out to Helmand to mentor the Afghan National Police without understanding the level they were at. We thought we would be arresting people, helping them to police efficiently. Instead we were literally training them how to point a gun on the ranges, and telling them why you should not stop cars and demand “taxes”.

Most of them were corrupt and took drugs, particularly opium. The lads would go into police stations at night and they would be stoned; sometimes they would fire indiscriminately at nothing.

They had no understanding of the basics of what it means to be a policeman. We expected to be teaching adults at a certain level and then realised we would be changing nappies. Give them 20 rounds and they will hit the target once.

The first time I saw them I realised that they had almost no training; some of them had very little ability. Their uniforms were dirty and didn’t fit. Their weapon-cleaning was non-existent.

They certainly didn’t have a concept of being upstanding members of the community. They had no loyalty, esprit de corps or cameraderie. …

How do you train this band of idiots and turn them into a force to be reckoned with if they have no sense of loyalty, no sense of belonging?

The biggest problem was that we didn’t know who we were getting. There were no security checks – they were literally allowed to come into the compound and we had to rely on the local chief of police, who recruited them. We kept a close eye on them because we didn’t know or trust them – it was for our own security.

Perhaps half of them genuinely wanted to try to make the community safe: they had the right intention but the attention span of gnats. Twenty would turn up one day, none the next, then 15, then suddenly a new face would appear.

It was difficult just getting them to a basic level, to do things like man a post. They would take drugs, go to sleep, leave their post, have sex with each other. Very few were vigilant or alert. …

British troops felt extremely vulnerable. If they were going out on patrol they didn’t tell the Afghans where, so they couldn’t pass on the information – they didn’t want improvised explosive devices (IEDs) laid in the area. They didn’t trust them one bit.

There was an operation involving the Brits and the Afghan National Army to clear Nad-e-Ali, and it cost lives. The police were left at checkpoints, but within 48 hours all the checkpoints had been overrun or the police just buggered off. As soon as the ground was won it was lost again. …

Lives get lost for nothing. …

I am convinced that a lot of money has been wasted and people have lost their lives unnecessarily because it was for a political end, and not a military decision. The British Army has been pushed into doing something it should not be. …

A ship named the Francop, carrying cargo from Iran to Syria, was intercepted and searched Tuesday near Cyprus by the Israeli navy. Hundreds of tons of weaponry were found on it, including some 3,000 rockets almost certainly destined for Hizbullah.

The president of the United States seems not to regard this as being of any importance. We cannot find that he has said anything about it.

He issued a statement to commemorate the taking of 66 American hostages in Tehran on November 4, 1979, in which he had nothing to say about the continuing mass demonstrations inside Iran against the regime, or the violent treatment to which the demonstrators are being subjected.

He said:

Thirty years ago today, the American Embassy in Tehran was seized. The 444 days that began on November 4, 1979 deeply affected the lives of courageous Americans who were unjustly held hostage, and we owe these Americans and their families our gratitude for their extraordinary service and sacrifice.

This event helped set the United States and Iran on a path of sustained suspicion, mistrust, and confrontation. I have made it clear that the United States of America wants to move beyond this past, and seeks a relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran based upon mutual interests and mutual respect. We do not interfere in Iran’s internal affairs. We have condemned terrorist attacks against Iran. We have recognized Iran’s international right to peaceful nuclear power. We have demonstrated our willingness to take confidence-building steps along with others in the international community. We have accepted a proposal by the International Atomic Energy Agency to meet Iran’s request for assistance in meeting the medical needs of its people. We have made clear that if Iran lives up to the obligations that every nation has, it will have a path to a more prosperous and productive relationship with the international community.

Iran must choose. We have heard for thirty years what the Iranian government is against; the question, now, is what kind of future it is for. The American people have great respect for the people of Iran and their rich history. The world continues to bear witness to their powerful calls for justice, and their courageous pursuit of universal rights. It is time for the Iranian government to decide whether it wants to focus on the past, or whether it will make the choices that will open the door to greater opportunity, prosperity, and justice for its people.

Michael Ledeen reports and comments at PajamasMedia:

Big demonstrations still going on all over the country: Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan, Kermanshah, Zahedan, Arak, Mazandaran, Tabriz, Rasht confirmed so far, and no doubt we will hear of others in the next hours and days.

The regime has failed to intimidate the people; the effect of the violence, the brutal savagery, the mass rapes, executions, and torture is to intensify their contempt (they trampled pictures of Supreme Leader Khamenei). …

Alas, their contempt is not limited to their own tyrants. It extends to President Obama, who today issued a masterpiece of appeasement and all but groveled in begging the leaders of the Islamic Republic to make a deal. …

He could not spare a single word for the plight of the people of Iran, who were being beaten, clubbed, stabbed and shot as he issued his statement.

This is Jimmy Carter all over again, and just as Carter’s appeasement of the Islamic Republic led to the death of countless innocents, in Iran and around the world, so Obama’s appeasement will do the same. He, and his administration, are accomplices to evil.

It’s a metaphor from the German-speaking world: a bicyclist – one who treads down hard (as when pedaling) on those he despises while he bows (as over handlebars) to those he respects.

*

Ben Rhodes, who is Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications and the writer of many of his foreign policy speeches (now you know the name of the culprit), said, according to The Washington Post:

“Our interests are the same with our allies and our adversaries. We’re saying the same thing to everybody. Our interests are the same no matter what country we’re talking to.”

If this were really the Weltanschauung shaping Obama’s foreign policy, it would be not merely misconceived, not just naive, not even simply stupid – it would be lunatic.

But in fact he doesn’t treat friends and foes alike.

Bowing to America’s ‘adversaries’, he  –

Gently propitiates the Mullahcracy of Iran and lets it become a nuclear power. Ditto the Despotism of North Korea. Kindly lets Iranian and al-Qaeda terrorists roar back into Iraq. Cozies up to Dictator Hugo Chavez. Literally bows to Saudi Arabia’s tyrant-in-chief who is spreading ‘soft’ jihad throughout America and the whole Western world. Lends a sympathetic hand to the flesh-eating Molloch of the Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, to help him evade trial. Yields graciously to rapacious Russia. Implores the barbaric Taliban to grant him a face-saving peace in Afghanistan [see the post immediately below]. Creeps cap-in-hand to Communist China. Plays nice with the slave-keepers of Cuba.

Stamping on America’s friends, he –

Snaps his fingers at Britain. Bullies Honduras. Cold-shoulders Colombia. Alienates Israel. Refuses to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Looks the other way while Georgia is invaded and partially occupied by Russia. Breaks US promises of defense shields to Poland and the Czech Republic and, as an afterthought, lets them know his irrevocable decision with a casual midnight phone call – or does he get Hillary to text them the message?

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.”