Stardate 20011125.0742 (On Screen): As part of the publicity and runup to the meeting in Bonn on Tuesday where the warlords will try to decide what Afghanistan's new government will look like, Afghan President Rabbani has been making a lot of press releases. This one says that he thinks that the foreign al Qaeda soldiers should be turned over to the UN, to get them out of Afghanistan. He doesn't want them in the nation and doesn't want to have to decide what should be done with them.
I would completely oppose giving them to the UN. These foreign al Qaeda soldiers are the primary target of this war. The primary point of this war was to neutralize them and to prevent them from having the ability to operate in any way, shape or form in the future. My biggest fear is that if they were given to the UN, the UN might well repatriate them -- and then Pandora's box would be opened and we'd have 30 years of unrest all over the world caused by these guys. That's not tolerable, and not something we can risk. Furthermore, it's not clear why the UN would be involved in this given it's near uselessness in fighting this war. The war was fought by the Afghan Northern Alliance and by the US and UK, and those prisoners are ours. If the new government of Afghanistan doesn't want them, they should give them to us. We'll confine them and keep them from making mischief in future. But given the breadth of opinions at the UN, and the prevalence of anti-Americanism there, I don't see how we could trust them with this. (discussion in progress)
