Biden Bumbles – Also, Sun Rises In East

To keep from having to reprint the entire interview, let me first explain that, in this exchange, Newsweek and Biden have been discussing the fact that, in the past, the United States was willing to leave the Taliban alone provided they did not harbor or materially support terrorist organizations. Obviously the Taliban was unwilling to accept those terms. Now that they are effectively out of power, but not done trying to take it back, Newsweek wanted to know what the path forward entails.

BIDEN: Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy. That’s critical. There is not a single statement that the president has ever made in any of our policy assertions that the Taliban is our enemy because it threatens U.S. interests. If, in fact, the Taliban is able to collapse the existing government, which is cooperating with us in keeping the bad guys from being able to do damage to us, then that becomes a problem for us.

In a long, long, long list of gaffes (just in his scant time as VP), this one has to be in the top three.

Biden also backs the idea of negotiating with the Taliban in an attempt to end the movement’s resistance to Afghanistan’s new government.

The Taliban is not populated with people you can cut deals with. If I know this, how in the hell doesn’t Joe Biden know this? Biden was brought on to the Obama ticket because he supposedly was a foreign policy heavyweight. How could someone with those sorts of credentials EVER believe that an organization like the Taliban can be negotiated with?

Name me even one instance where negotiations with a group like this has ever ended a guerrilla war. What draws people towards groups like the Taliban is that they do not negotiate. The stand up for what they believe in, and will fight to the death (or, more likely, the hapless deaths of their followers) to see things through. There are no half measures with them, and all you need to look at to know this is the way they ran Afghanistan before the United States flung them from power. Did you see a lot of half-measures in the way they dealt out their twisted totalitarian variant of Islam? No. There is the right way, and that way is not open to deals or alterations.