Biden Compounds Disgrace with Willful Blindness about Our Jihadist Enemies By Andrew C. McCarthy
P resident Biden has disgracefully ceded Afghanistan to the Taliban, betraying our government’s first obligation to protect Americans. He left behind hundreds of American citizens, as well as who knows how many thousands of green-card holders and Afghans who assisted our government the past 20 years. Having committed too little of our $710 billion-per-annum military to carry out his evacuation order responsibly, Biden reneged on his vow to get them out.
The president has also abandoned the counterterrorism mission of denying anti-American jihadists sanctuary and operational partnership with the jihadist Taliban regime. Thus, he has imperiled the homeland and virtually guaranteed terrorist attacks against U.S. installations and interests overseas.
Not content with that, the president and his State Department now insist on further humiliating our nation with ignorant, post-surrender claptrap. For example, adumbrating the president’s pathetic speech later in the day, State’s spokesman Ned Price spent Tuesday morning piously spouting that the Taliban need to meet their basic “commitments and obligations in Afghanistan.” These duties, Price says, include “respecting basic rights of the people” and “upholding its commitments on counterterrorism.”
This is sheer idiocy.
Throughout the Obama-Biden administration, I complained incessantly about the government’s refusal to grapple with the ideology of our jihadist enemies. Democrats are aligned with Islamist organizations, many with Muslim Brotherhood ties. Ergo, at the insistence of these Muslim activists, the Obama-Biden administration admonished our law-enforcement, intelligence, and military agencies to avoid focusing on the ideology — sharia supremacism — that catalyzes violent jihad.
Further, the administration adopted a counterterrorism strategy known as “Countering Violent Extremism.” The label “violent extremism” was chosen deliberately.
Since the 1990s and particularly after 9/11, the word terrorism has connoted jihadism. That is not solely due to the spate of mass-murder attacks by Muslim terrorists. Islamic scripture undeniably commands Muslims to use “terror” in fighting their perceived enemies, and sharia supremacists are committed literalists on this point, eschewing interpretations of Islam that “contextualize” these exhortations to brutality as confined to their ancient time and place.
Unwilling to grapple with our enemies’ ideology, the Obama-Biden tack was to shift the focus away from jihadism, which it labored to redefine as a benign struggle for internal self-improvement. Our government thus bleated that any ideology, taken to an extreme, could inspire violence. Ergo, the Obama-Biden strategy supplanted terrorism with violent extremism.
Naturally, the Biden administration has picked up where Obama-Biden left off.
This concentration on violence, at the expense of animating ideology, has two calamitous consequences, and we will be dealing with both as long as Biden and today’s progressive Democrats are in power.
First, if investigators are discouraged from focusing on ideological allegiance to sharia supremacism, and instead are directed to home in on violence, then we are stuck with pre-9/11 counterterrorism’s main flaw: Investigations are triggered only after the violence has happened. Rather than preventing mass-murder attacks, our only recourse is to prosecute mass-murder attacks — assuming the terrorists are still alive and in a place where they can be arrested.
Second, if we do not make our enemies’ ideology the subject of intense study, rather than consciously avoiding notice of it, we will be incapable of understanding, predicting, and effectively countering them.
Which brings us to the benighted bleating of Ned Price.
The Taliban — as even the Biden State Department must know, its head in the sand notwithstanding — are a sharia-supremacist organization. It is worse than irrational to lecture them about “the rights of the people.” Their conception of the rights of the people, which predates the Enlightenment, to say nothing of the Federalist Papers, is fundamentally different from the Western conception.
When American officials address the Taliban, as the Biden administration does, as if we and they mean the same thing by “rights,” we are conveying ignorance and inspiring the Taliban to continue deceiving us.
Let us repeat what has been well known, except to the willfully blind, since before the Taliban came into existence.
In 1990, Islamist regimes came together in Cairo, under the guise of what was then known as the Organization of the Islamic Conference (it’s still the OIC but has changed the name to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation), to issue the Declaration of Human Rights in Islam. To reiterate what I wrote here a decade ago, leading Islamists took the initiative of issuing this declaration “precisely because Islamic states reject the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights promulgated by the United Nations under the guidance of progressives in the United States and the West. That is, the leaders of the Muslim world are adamant that Western principles are not universal.”
According to the declaration, it is the burden of the Islamic ummah — the notional global community of Muslims — to civilize the rest of the world, not the other way around. This is to be achieved by the installation of sharia.
As the declaration directs, “all rights and freedoms are subject to the Islamic Shari’ah,” which “is the only source of reference for [their] explanation or clarification.” Though men and women are said by the declaration to be equal in “human dignity,” sharia elucidates their very different rights and obligations — and emphatically denies them equal protection under the law. Sharia expressly controls freedom of movement and claims of asylum. The declaration further states that “there shall be no crime or punishment except as provided for in Shari’ah” — a blatant reaffirmation of Islam’s hudud penalties, which are deemed cruel and unusual in the West. And the right to free expression is permitted only insofar as it “would not be contrary to the principles of Shari’ah.” This means that Islam may not be critically examined, nor will the ummah abide any dissemination of “information” that would “violate sanctities and the dignity of Prophets, undermine moral and ethical Values, or disintegrate, corrupt or harm society, or weaken its faith.”
The only “basic rights of the people” recognized by the Taliban are those prescribed by sharia. Our government should long ago have acknowledged that, as construed in fundamentalist Islam (to which the Taliban make up a bare fraction of adherents), sharia tenets contradict bedrock Western principles of equality, liberty, and privacy.
Again, that’s why Islamists insisted on their own declaration of rights. Sharia cannot be meshed with Western rights. That, moreover, is why the Afghan constitution, an effort to meld sharia and transnational progressivism that was drafted by the State Department in 2004, never had a prayer of enduring. It was an exercise in incoherence.
If the Taliban made a literal commitment to Biden that they would uphold “rights,” they meant sharia rights, not rights as we understand them in our Constitution or, more broadly, in the West.
It is similarly nonsensical for the Biden administration to burble about the Taliban’s supposed need to “uphold its commitments on counterterrorism.” Sharia supremacists do not subscribe to the same interpretation of terrorism as we in the West do — and don’t even try to talk to them about “violent extremism” because you’ll only make them laugh.
In sharia supremacism, Muslims who attack non-Muslim enemies, whether to drive them out of Islamic-held territories or to pressure them to implement sharia in their own territories, are not engaged in “terrorism.” They are engaged in jihad for the sake of Allah, the mission the Taliban interpret Muslim scripture to command. Indeed, that is why the Taliban would not surrender al-Qaeda leaders to us after 9/11, even though they could have remained in power by doing so.
And 20 years later, what is the first thing the Taliban did upon taking Kabul? They put security under the direction of Khalil ur-Rahman Haqqani, who for a decade has been a formally designated terrorist under U.S. law, for whom our government has offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture.
This was done quite intentionally. It is not just that the Taliban were further mortifying the United States by placing the safety of our undermanned military forces in the hands of enemy terrorists — with the predictable result that 13 members of our military were killed, either with the positive cooperation or the sedulous inattention of Haqqani. The Taliban were making an unabashed statement that they do not see the Haqqani organization and al-Qaeda as terrorists. These groups, which have been interwoven in the Taliban’s ranks for many years, are deemed to be allies fighting in the cause of sharia.
Therefore, to admonish the Taliban about their “counterterrorism commitments” is either to be delusional (i.e., to convince ourselves that we and the Taliban are on the same page about what “terrorism” must be “countered”) or to be speaking gibberish (i.e., the State Department knows it is talking nonsense but hopes the public will be soothed by it). And to hear Biden officials suggest that perhaps we can work cooperatively with the Taliban against the so-called Islamic State of Khorasan (ISIS-K) is just jaw-dropping. Sure, the Taliban and ISIS-K (a breakaway faction of al-Qaeda) may be rivals in the sense that each wants to run the emerging Afghan emirate. But they are both died-in-the-wool sharia-supremacist enterprises, completely united in their hatred of the United States.
If President Biden thinks he has gotten commitments from the Taliban on basic rights and counterterrorism, that is not a shoring up of our security. It is a doubling down on incompetence.
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