I'm the Boss

[Aliantha]

Now I know why the US is in such a precarious position. The government keeps giving money away to anyone who says they're in charge.

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

KABUL: For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war appeared to be showing promise, if only because of the repeated appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement.

But now, it turns out, Mansour was apparently not Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, US and Afghan officials now say that the Afghan man was an impostor and that high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little.

"It's not him," said a Western diplomat in Kabul involved in the discussions. "And we gave him a lot of money."

Apparently it was millions of dollars.