The Taliban – never formally recognized as a terrorist organization by the U.S. – took credit for the recent execution of ten Western doctors, nurses and translators in northern Afghanistan, where they were delivering free medical care to the poor.
Add this to this radical Islamist organization’s many other assassinations and abductions of aid workers that, according to the Agency Coordinating Body of Afghan Relief, has spiked dramatically in recent years.
As acknowledged in a new State Department report on terrorism, the Taliban also murders and maims Afghan civilians, with special attention to young girls attending school, kills foreign diplomats, and plots against the U.S. homeland. It has, of course, targeted our troops in the nearly nine-year-old war in Afghanistan.
These disfigurements (such as cutting off arms or ears) and executions are, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, a “war tactic” intended to stop the government from gathering intelligence and to isolate Afghans from Western aid that could ameliorate their lives and win their loyalty. Moreover, warns the Journal, this brutality foreshadows the fate that awaits “thousands of innocents” in Afghanistan if we do not defeat the organization.
Despite these extremists’ long and gruesome record, and its potential to do vastly more harm, Congress has perversely – or “bizarrely,” as Andrew McCarthy says – not bothered to amend the Authorization for the Use of Military Force adopted after 9/11 so as to designate the Taliban a terrorist group and our enemies in war.
Equally bizarrely, the State Department report does not list the Taliban even though we are at war with it, and even though it continues to name several other organizations which have nothing to do with anti-American terrorism, such as Kahane Chai, an Israeli group that disbanded years ago.
That our lawmakers designate the Taliban as terrorist is critical on three counts, explains McCarthy. Such a designation would
• stand as a formal U.S. declaration,
• discourage those who would provide material support to the Taliban, thus making it more difficult for it and similar groups to attack us (it is a grave federal crime to provide such support to a designated organization),
• lend important legal support to our fighting troops.
What will it take to get our political leaders to denounce these malefactors as terrorists and enemies before the world?
Just what are they waiting for – another devastating attack on our homeland?
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