The Taliban and Al Qaeda

 

The Taliban and Al Qaeda

 Andy McCarthy normally tells it like it is.  We may not like all of it even if it’s true. 

 This article explains the Taliban and Al Qaeda and how we’ve interacted with them.

 Excerpts:

“Every citizen. So immovable are we in our enlightened beliefs and their presumed attractiveness to everyone that a quarter-century later, we don’t even know our enemies well enough to grasp that, very basically, sharia-supremacists don’t do “citizen” as we construe that concept. It is foreign to their understanding of how society works.”

 “We persist anyway: We talk to fundamentalist Muslim societies about the nation-state, representative government, self-determination, the right to vote, legislators who advocate for their constituents’ interests. Understand: When we do this, we are speaking about our aspirations for them. It is not enough to say we’re not addressing their aspirations for themselves. We’re speaking in Western terms they find alien — even hostile.”

 “But the Taliban do not accept the republican form of government. They don’t just oppose it. Their raison d’etre is to fight it and establish their fundamentalist construction of sharia. Completely heedless of this, our government’s policy, irrationally but immovably, has been that the Taliban must be negotiated with, and that they will ultimately see the good sense in joining a representative republic in which their concerns — just like the concerns of Afghans who want Western liberalism — will be heard.”

 https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/america-has-been-in-denial-about-the-taliban-from-the-start/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=more-in&utm_term=third

 Ray Gruszecki

August 22, 2021