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WASHINGTON -- Vice President Joe Biden, known for his controversial off-the-cuff remarks, is taking heat for his recent comment that "the Taliban, per se, is not our enemy."

Right-wing bloggers and commentators have attacked Biden's comment, and presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney on Wednesday called it "one of the most strange comments ever to be uttered by the lips of a vice president."

"And this vice president, in particular, [has] said some strange things," he added.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said his office has been "flooded" with comments and tweets from service members, including one who asked, "If they aren't the enemy, who has been shooting at us all this time?"

"For the vice president of the United States to make a statement like that is an insult to the men and women who are serving today," McCain said on Fox News Tuesday night. "But also, what about the families of those who have been killed by the IEDs that the Taliban have manufactured, the same Taliban that sheltered bin Laden?"

Biden's spokeswoman, Kendra Barkoff, said Biden's statement wasn't incorrect and merely restated the administration's goal to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan."

"Politicians who criticize his remarks are either ignorant of why we are fighting in Afghanistan or playing politics with issues of war and peace," Barkoff wrote in an email. "Either way, they are profoundly wrong."
Biden made the comment during a Dec. 15 interview, released Monday, with Newsweek contributor Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and Biden's partner in a 2005 plan for a political solution in Iraq.

Biden said it would be "good enough" if Afghanistan were no longer a haven for terrorists set on harming the United States and its allies. But, he added, "We're not there yet."

"Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy," Biden told Gelb. "That's critical. There is not a single statement that the president has ever made in any of our policy assertions that the Taliban is our enemy because it threatens U.S. interests. If, in fact, the Taliban is able to collapse the existing government, which is cooperating with us in keeping the bad guys from being able to do damage to us, then that becomes a problem for us."

He said the United States is on a "dual track" with Afghanistan to continue targeting al-Qaida and making the Afghan government strong enough to negotiate with the Taliban without being overthrown by them.
"And at the same time," he continued, "try to get the Taliban to move in the direction to see to it that they, through reconciliation, commit not to be engaged with al-Qaida or any other organization that they would harbor to do damage to us and our allies."

In a briefing Monday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said the U.S. invaded Afghanistan because al-Qaida launched its 9/11 attacks from there, not because the Taliban was in power. Biden's comments reflect that "while we are fighting them ... the elimination of the Taliban is not the issue here," he said.
Asked whether Biden's comment was regrettable, Carney said only "when taken out of context."

The Afghan government supports reconciliation with the Taliban, provided the Taliban rejects al-Qaida, renounces violence and supports the Afghan constitution. The Obama administration supports that policy.
McCain said Biden has "some cockamamie idea" that the United States can negotiate peace with the Taliban as troops leave the country. All U.S. combat troops are scheduled to withdraw by the end of 2014.
He referred to news reports that the administration is considering releasing Taliban prisoners from the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"This is the most wrongheaded kind of thing that I have ever encountered," McCain said.

Romney began lashing out against Biden immediately Monday, saying his statement to Newsweek was "bizarre, factually wrong and an outrageous affront to our troops carrying out the fight in Afghanistan."

"The Taliban is clearly a bitter enemy of the United States," he said in a statement. "Vice President Biden's statement to the contrary calls into question the White House's leadership in Afghanistan -- or lack of it."
Biden's comment also gave former Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder another opportunity to argue that Biden should be replaced. Wilder, a Democrat, views Biden as a gaffe-prone liability to the administration. He called last year for President Barack Obama to dump Biden and make Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton his running mate in 2012.

"I fought in Korea, front line," Wilder said Tuesday on Fox News. "I knew who the enemy were. The enemy were the people who were firing at me and shooting at me."

TALIBAN'S BAN ON GROWING OPIUM POPPIES IS CALLED A SUCCESS

UNITED NATIONS, May 18 — The first American narcotics experts to go to Afghanistan under Taliban rule have concluded that the movement's ban on opium-poppy cultivation appears to have wiped out the world's largest crop in less than a year, officials said today.

The American findings confirm earlier reports from the United Nations drug control program that Afghanistan, which supplied about three-quarters of the world's opium and most of the heroin reaching Europe, had ended poppy planting in one season.....

As for the rest - it seems you're trying to justify the invasion.

The blood of the victims is as much on those that ordered the invasion as it is on those who fought back.

event horizon wrote:As far as I know, the pipeline deal fell through as a result of OBL's presence in Afghanistan.

Strange your theory about the Taliban's potential relationship with the US doesn't live up to the hype. Otherwise the US would have ignored the OBL residing in Afghanistan issue and pushed through with the pipeline.

We thus see a clear example of how human rights, democracy and egalitarian social development are directly opposed by deliberate Western policies to further the economic interests of Western corporate elites. In this case, a faction whose policies of brutal repression are extensively documented and well known was being covertly supported at the expense of the Afghan people in the name of US strategic and corporate interests. This support only ceased when it became clear that the Taliban was incapable of establishing the sort of conditions necessary for the security of the proposed pipeline.

As documented in the book I coauthored with Guillaume Dasquie, “Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth,” the Clinton and Bush administrations negotiated with the Taliban, both to get the repressive regime to widen its government as well as look favorably on U.S. companies’ attempts to construct an oil pipeline. The Bush White House stepped up negotiations with the Taliban in 2001. When those talks stalled in July, a Bush administration representative threatened the Taliban with military reprisals if the government did not go along with American demands.

This support only ceased when it became clear that the Taliban was incapable of establishing the sort of conditions necessary for the security of the proposed pipeline.

As documented in the book I coauthored with Guillaume Dasquie, “Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth,” the Clinton and Bush administrations negotiated with the Taliban, both to get the repressive regime to widen its government as well as look favorably on U.S. companies’ attempts to construct an oil pipeline. The Bush White House stepped up negotiations with the Taliban in 2001. When those talks stalled in July, a Bush administration representative threatened the Taliban with military reprisals if the government did not go along with American demands.

Until the 1998 al-Qaida embassy bombings, the Clinton administration’s approach toward the Taliban was much the same as Unocal’s: All parties agreed that the political stabilization of Afghanistan was crucial to the region, and was also a way to gain access to oil reserves of the Caspian Sea region. Though bin Laden had been in the country since 1996, the U.S. had not pressured the Taliban to hand him over.

The embassy bombings in August 1998 changed everything. The Clinton administration denounced the regime and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright turned up the heat on Taliban human rights abuses. The United Nations imposed sanctions, freezing Afghanistan’s foreign assets and limiting its citizens’ travel. The U.S. continued to talk to the Taliban, but the emphasis was on extraditing bin Laden in exchange for international recognition; the pipeline was off the table. Unocal, which had been close to finalizing its pipeline deal before the embassy bombings, cancelled it.

When George W. Bush took office in 2001, his administration made new overtures to the Taliban, and the pipeline deal gained renewed support, as an incentive to get the Taliban to make political concessions and form a broader government. U.S. representatives met with Afghanistan’s former King Shah, to see if he might be included in a new government. And American companies began exploring the failed 1998 pipeline project. A report by an Afghan-born Enron manager in July 2001, for instance, illustrates that company’s deep interest in some sort of pipeline deal. Enron had begun funding the same sorts of humanitarian projects as Unocal had three years earlier.

In March 2001, several Taliban officials, including Sayed Rahmattulah Hashimi, Mullah Omar’s personal advisor, were invited to Washington by their U.S. lobbyist, Leila Helms, the niece of former CIA Director Richard Helms.

shafique wrote:

event horizon wrote:As far as I know, the pipeline deal fell through as a result of OBL's presence in Afghanistan.

Interesting spin. Shame you haven't produced any evidence to back it up.

Here's a well researched piece from May 2001, with loads of links and references, and the clear conclusion is:

We thus see a clear example of how human rights, democracy and egalitarian social development are directly opposed by deliberate Western policies to further the economic interests of Western corporate elites. In this case, a faction whose policies of brutal repression are extensively documented and well known was being covertly supported at the expense of the Afghan people in the name of US strategic and corporate interests. This support only ceased when it became clear that the Taliban was incapable of establishing the sort of conditions necessary for the security of the proposed pipeline.

As far as I know, the pipeline deal fell through as a result of OBL's presence in Afghanistan.

The U.S. continued to talk to the Taliban, but the emphasis was on extraditing bin Laden in exchange for international recognition; the pipeline was off the table. Unocal, which had been close to finalizing its pipeline deal before the embassy bombings, cancelled it.

Again, the message was that if the Taliban would extradite bin Laden and form a broad-based national government, it could win international recognition and reap extensive economic subsidies from the construction of a pipeline.

shafique wrote:The big thing point is that the US government, whether under Clinton or Bush, were negotiating with the Taliban and fundamentally agreeing with what Biden said - that they are not, per se, the enemy but a party to make deals with. Indeed the last meeting was August 2001.