White House: Taliban No Threat to U.S.

Former Indian diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar writes:

India has a substantial policy crisis on its hands with the US indicating that the Taliban did not pose a direct threat to its interests. [...]

A senior US official in deep-briefing in Washington unveiled the thinking prevailing in the White House: The Taliban did not pose a direct threat to the US and, therefore, America's war on terror in South Asia would rather focus on tackling Al Qaeda inside Pakistan. [...]

We have the first official signal that the Barack Obama administration is now inclined to send only as many more troops to Afghanistan as are needed to keep Al Qaeda at bay.

The stunning news is that the US has reframed the question 'who is the US's adversary?' What we are now to believe is that the Al Qaeda terror network is distinct from the Taliban and the US military has been for eight years fighting the Taliban even though it posed no direct threat to America.

In the history of wars, such an incredible somersault has never probably been attempted by human ingenuity. The US diplomats will now fan out from their embassies in world capitals and propagate that the Taliban has no agenda to harm other countries. This was exactly what they used to propagate a decade ago until their own embassies in Kenya and Tanzania got bombed and a gaping hole was put into USS Cole by a jihadi.

Clearly, Obama is content with ensuring that Al Qaeda doesn't regroup in Afghanistan as was the case before the 9/11 attacks. The limited American mission implies that the US will in immediate terms require only a small increase in its troop levels in Afghanistan. Most important, the US has decided to pivot its regional strategy by strengthening the Pakistani military and encouraging it to take the battle to extremists inside its borders.

All this adds up to a very substantial policy crisis for our government. The much-touted US-India strategic partnership is in tatters. The partnership is an illusion when the two sides cannot even see eye to eye on what constitutes a threat to their national security.

Therefore, the argument has been made that the strategic partnership between India and the U.S. is an illusion. According to the comment thread accompanying the link, there is general agreement with the argument.

Curiously, it's unknown how the Obama administration concluded that the Taliban is not a threat to the U.S. since the Taliban has issued direct threats to the U.S. In particular, early this year was a specific threat to attack Washington, D.C. One would imagine that Obama would be aware of the threat since he was living in Washington at the time.

Frankly, I suggest the administration wants to weasel-word the war in Afghanistan to justify managing the conflict as a cops-and-robbers police chase rather than a military battle front.