House Speaker John Boehner said on Tuesday that the administration’s decision to negotiate with terrorists and exchange 5 Taliban leaders for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl will prove to be a dangerous deal down the road.
“We're going to pay for this,” he told reporters. “There is not any doubt in my mind there are going to be costs — lost lives associated with what came out of this.”
But apparently, Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier’s sees things differently. Speaking on MSNBC Tuesday, she said the Taliban aren’t terrorists, rather, they’re “part of the fabric of Afghanistan.”
“Let me underscore the term ‘terrorist,’” Speier tried to explain. “The Taliban is part of the fabric of Afghanistan — they were part of the leadership of that country before we engaged there.”
“We are now actively attempting to get the Taliban to negotiate with Karzai and the Afghanistani [sic] government,” she continued, “because there will be some cooperation, some level of coordination between the two if that country is going to survive and move forward.”
“So,” she concluded, “to say that they are ‘terrorists,’ at this point, is not necessarily accurate.”
There’s just one, uh, small, problem with that assessment, however.
The Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in the first place by indiscriminate violence, played host to al-Qaida forces that murdered several thousand civilians in one day on American soil, and for almost a decade has been employing systematic cruelty against civilians and fighting an undeclared war, without uniforms or formal command structure, against a force that is upholding a U.N. mandate for the rebuilding of the country. Moreover, during its period in power, it ran the country as a vast concentration camp, enslaving the female population and conducting a campaign of extermination against the Hazara minority.