Biden Wrong: The Only Friendly Taliban is a Dead One

COMMENTARY | According to Fox News, Vice President Joe Biden said in an interview for Newsweek that the Taliban are not the enemy of the United States. The White House is defending the statement as having been taken out of context.

The Taliban, for those who have forgotten, was the regime that ruled over Afghanistan between shortly after the withdraw of Soviet troops and the invasion by the United States and her allies in the wake of 9/11. The Taliban ran a regime that pushed the envelope for a totalitarian state, making the Iranian mullahacracy seem tame by comparison. They also provided a safe haven for Al Qaida, the terrorist organization that conducted the 9/11 attacks and with whom the United States had been at war ever since.

Biden appears to be engaging in a kind of tortured nuance to the effect that our enemy in Afghanistan is really Al Qaida. That the Taliban are there and are shooting at American soldiers is just a kind of happenstance that could easily be avoided if only some sort of agreement could be reached. If the Taliban were to agree to keep Al Qaida out of Afghanistan, the United States would happily leave that unhappy country and leave it to its fate.

It's an assessment that has many American veterans of the Afghan Campaign, many of whom bear the scars, physical and mental, of battles with the Taliban, puzzled. What does one call an entity that shoots at and attempts to blow up Americans who are attempting to provide some sort of order to Afghanistan so that its people might have a chance of freedom? The loyal oppositions? Friends that we have yet to make? Our deluded brethren?

Biden as well as the White House is engaging in Orwellian rhetoric to try to dilute what is happening in Central Asia. An attempt to make some sort of deal with the Taliban, which is part of the administration's strategy, is something that is doomed to fail. The Taliban follows a brand of Islam that does not hold with compromise with unbelievers or even believers that it regards as insufficiently Muslim. Their unshakable goal is to ease the United States out of Afghanistan and to re-establish the theocracy it had during much of the 1990s. If they want to play host to any jihadis like Al Qaida, it is no business of the infidel to object to it.

To paraphrase and unfortunate turn of phrase, the only friendly Taliban is a dead one.

Source: White House Stands by Biden Statement That Taliban Isn't U.S. Enemy, Fox News, Dec 19, 2011