>The mood in 2001 was one where diplomacy was impossible short of unconditionally handing over everyone in Al Qaeda to the US. That wasn't an unreasonable requ

>The mood in 2001 was one where diplomacy was impossible short of unconditionally handing over everyone in Al Qaeda to the US. That wasn't an unreasonable request all things considered. We should have tried much harder to get the Taliban to accept that deal. They needed to look like more legitimate government with a stronger grip on power. We needed Al Qaeda. It should have been an easy deal to make. Marketing it would have been harder. We've made the same deal a dozen times before. It's not like we didn't have the playbook ready to go. All we had to do was translate the end user guides from Spanish and replace "commies" with "Al Qaeda". Obviously the details would have needed to be hammered out but it's not like the precedent wasn't there.