Stardate 20011006.0636 (On Screen): And now we come to it. Now is when we have to show resolve. I am confident that our government will do so. The Taliban have offered to free the 8 western missionaries if the US will reassure the Afghani people that they should return to their cities, and stop making threats. This is a tacit admission by the Taliban that they have lost control, a desirable situation for us. It is something we have worked very hard to achieve. Now they are actually asking us to help them regain control of their people; why should we do that for them? Doing so would make them far more difficult to fight later, and cost more of our soldier's lives to defeat them. This is another inept diplomatic move by the Taliban; the only problem is that there will be people in the West who will go for this carrot by focusing exclusively on the 8 missionaries, without seeing the larger and more important issues. We cannot make this trade.
(discuss)Update: An interesting military tactic might be to make occasional overflights of the Afghani cities by lone F-117A's at night to drop leaflets. It hardly matters what the leaflets say; the real message would be "Hi; our bomber was here and these leaflets could have been high explosives." Sun Tzu tells us that Supreme excellence in war lies in making your opponent surrender without a fight. One of our goals is to destabilize the Taliban so severely that they either collapse without action by us, or with as little direct action on our part as necessary. By so doing, we shorten the war and minimize the risk to our soldiers. It appears that this is part of what is going on, and that is good.
Update: Here's the actual announcement by the Taliban Foreign Ministry.
Update: The US government has rejected any trade for the missionaries.
