The Taliban may have taken over Afghanistan, executed our Afghan allies, and begun holding Americans hostage after President Joe Biden abandoned them, but we have nothing to worry about. The State Department is watching closely, and it is very concerned.
The State Department expressed its concerns about the Taliban forming a government that “consists exclusively of individuals who are members of the Taliban or their close associates and no women,” before hedging that the United States “will judge the Taliban by its actions, not words.”
The State Department is also “concerned by the affiliations and track records of some of the individuals.” After all, why shouldn’t they be? Several members of the Haqqani network, which is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S., make up the Taliban Cabinet. That includes Sirajuddin Haqqani, who has a $10 million bounty on his head on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. He is now set to be the Taliban’s interior minister.
The State Department is very concerned about this, in part, because it insisted that the Haqqani network was a separate entity from the Taliban to justify the Biden administration’s cooperation with the Taliban. It was yet another ridiculous assertion by the administration that was meant to ease the failure of the withdrawal.
Somehow, our seasoned professionals at the State Department have missed the fact that the Taliban are still the Taliban. That alone should have been “concerning” long before we reached the point where the Taliban started picking out their government. It should have been a concern before we entrusted them with the security of Kabul during the evacuation, and it certainly should still be a concern given that the administration stranded Americans and our Afghan allies to the Taliban’s care.
The State Department talking about its “concerns” is made all the more pathetic by the fact that everyone knows there will be no consequences. State Department officials keep trying to pretend that the Taliban care about international legitimacy for this reason. It’s a made-up “punishment” because the administration is not going to hold the Taliban accountable for anything. In fact, it handed them everything they wanted: abandoned military equipment, the Afghans who helped us, and even some American hostages to boot.
So it’s great that the State Department is finally “concerned” about the prospect of the Taliban governing Afghanistan again for the first time since 9/11. Maybe the administration can stop pretending that the Taliban are supposed to be our new counterterrorism partner.
