Des Browne's just said it again - we should negotiate with the Taliban. First, he said it at the Labour Party conference in September, then Blair's former chief of staff Jonathan Powell said it two weeks ago, now Des Browne has said it again...!
Des Browne told the Daily Telegraph that we need to bring them "into a frame of mind that they accept that their political ambitions will be delivered by politics."
But does Des Browne really understand what their political ambitions are? I've outlined these before on CentreRight. At the very least they are a radical Islamist state with strict and often arbitary sharia imposed on all. When Afghanistan actually had a Taliban government, the Taliban religious police were hated and feared - with good reason - by the majority of ordinary people living in Afghan cities such as Jalalabad where I lived at the time.
Is perhaps the real reason Des Browne and Jonathan Powell have been "testing the waters" on negotiating with the Taliban - the fact that the Treasury want to impose an astonishing £1 billion cut in Britian's defence budget at a time when Britian's armed forces are already massively overstretched fighting on two separate fronts...?
Incidentally, £1 billion is also the amount of extra money that Blair and Brown agreed we should pay to the EU this year in the 2005 deal they signed on Britian's EU rebate. Hmm...
