Andrew C. McCarthy at The Corner ("The one and only.") took issue with the Foreign Terrorist Organizations list.
Money quote(s):
"(T)he Taliban is not included in State’s listing of Foreign Terrorist Organizations — not the Taliban whose terrorism and safe haven for al Qaeda are the justification for continuing to have our troops fight and die in Afghanistan"
&
"I’ve argued before (most recently here) that Congress should amend the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force — the legal foundation for conducting U.S. combat operations in the War on Terror — so that the Taliban organizations (among others) are expressly specified as the enemy. But what’s the chance that we will be clear about who the enemy is if the administration can’t even bring itself to say the Taliban is a terrorist organization?" (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)
Recollecting from the dim recesses of memory, but we went to war in the territory of the Taliban-controlled government of Afghanistan in order to get at Al-Qaeda, the Taliban having declined to give them up to us when we asked nicely.
That approach having lacked much in the way of positive results, a U.S./NATO-led coalition went to war with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan since the two seemed unwilling or unable to extricate themselves from one another.
"(I)f the Obama administration were encouraging negotiations with the Taliban (it is) and even anticipating a settlement in which the Taliban were brought into the Afghan government (ditto), the State Department wouldn’t want to complicate that by naming the Taliban as a terrorist organization, right? So we are putting our forces in harm’s way in the War on Terror order to fight an outfit that we won’t call “terrorists” and that we actually see as part of the future Afghan government we are building."
8/25
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