Here is a limerick, twisting the literal meaning of a commonly used phrase, Russian vs. English.

For Hil it’s one word for another,
As for Obama, or Bill or her brother.
I know that it’s true
What they’d do to you,
The Russians would do to your mother.

Unless there’s some underlying jocular/sardonic interplay at work between the two, it seems like they’re just trying to diss us.

So there was a mistake, was it really the proper time and place to bring that up?

Given that, it was a stupid stunt by Mrs. Cliton in any case.

That is how you “talk to” people like Hezbollah.

There is also a deep Arabist mind set inside the British Foreign Service, and a tendency to think they are very clever and can play various Arab factions against each other to achieve their foreign policy ends. They (the British) thought that they were too clever by half in their “enlightened” administration of Basra, yet the truth was they were too weak to confront the militant Shia parties, which should not reflect badly on the British soldier on the ground, whom their government had put in an untenable situation.
To wit, you are correct that they should be dealing with the Lebanese government, and not Hezbollah.

They stick out like a sore thumb to the locals.

The Taliban are NOT comparable to the Sunnis operating in civil garb bombing the road net nearby their homes and fields in Al Anbar.

One must stop conflating the two phenomena.

We have got to stop playing helicopter warfare in Afghanistan. It’s brutally expensive.

The essential focus for the Afghanistan must be cost control so as to permit endurance. Cost control is best had by zeroing out NATO and getting Afghans and Indians to pound the Kush on foot. That’s what the Taliban are doing. There are no panzer corps or anything like advanced technical warfare. You just need boots on the ground.

The Afghan Army needs to be expanded and greatly focused on engineering and scouting functions.

But the the Taliban needs to be peeled away from the people, not the other way around, and that has to occur not just in Afghanistan but the NWFP of Pakistan as well. but to do so requires a constant security presence that share a common goal against a common foe. Some tribal leaders in addition to the elders have sided with the Taliban because of intimidation, or because they were bought with promises which could have been as little as we’ll let you live or as great as a position in a new caliphate. Probably included land goats and a greater percentage of the drug profits or control of the payola in a particular area, who knows.

That is the difference between being a “moderate” Taliban and just a poor tribesman. Payola does wonders for religious fervor, just ask bin laden, or President Obama.

The Surge in Afghanistan is being used as a justification for this approach, the idea being to replicate the Sunni Awakening of Iraq among at least some of the tribes that are under Taliban control. The gigantic flaw here is that the Sunni Awakening only occurred after the security situation had improved enough that Sunni leaders saw a viable option. The Awakening occurred after the “reduction” of Fallujha in very nearly the old medieval sense. As they said in Vietnam, get them by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow.

Think Clinton making nice with Fatah in Gaza as an example of “peeling away” part of the Taliban, not Bush cleaning the terrorists’ clocks so that the Anbar Awakening could occur.