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It Is a Delusion to Believe the Taliban Rebrand
(The Times-UK) Lt.-Gen. (ret.) H.R. McMaster - Motivated by the desire to justify the surrender of Afghanistan to the Taliban, Western military and political leaders have forgotten who it was we fought in Afghanistan and Pakistan for two decades. Some now talk about "Taliban 2.0," as if it's a different entity, somehow, from the one that harbored al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden as he plotted the mass murder of 2,977 innocents on U.S. soil 20 years ago. The Taliban are determined to impose a brutal form of sharia on the Afghan people and are intertwined with terrorists determined to continue their jihad against all who do not conform to their perverted interpretation of Islam. After their defeat in 2001, the Taliban regenerated, with the help of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence and al-Qaeda. The new Afghan interior minister, Sirajuddin Haqqani, is the military commander of the Taliban and the leader of a terrorist organization connected to al-Qaeda that specializes in kidnapping and mass murder attacks. The first step in mitigating the calamity in Afghanistan is moral clarity based on an understanding of these enemies of humanity. The writer is a former U.S. national security advisor who served as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army for 34 years, including service in Iraq and Afghanistan.