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Joe Biden has a long history of verbal flubs, but this one may take the cake. ‘The Taliban, per se, is not our enemy,” Biden said. That’s right. The Vice-President of the United States, initially added to the Obama campaign to add foreign policy gravitas to the ticket, has come out and questioned whether the Taliban are our enemy. Let’s get right to the context, which the media will inevitably hype in an effort to conflate an amazing gaffe with straight-talkin’, straight-shooting’ foreign policy from the VP. Biden was answering questions from Les Gelb for a Newsweek interview, the full...

In an interview with Leslie Gelb in Newsweek, Vice President Joe Biden says: "Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy. 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." Via Ben Smith. Interestingly, in the rest of the interview...

Carney: America Is 'Fighting' the Taliban, but the Taliban Is Not America's Enemy Daniel Halper December 19, 2011 4:44 PM White House spokesman Jay Carney was asked about Vice President Joe Biden's comments on the Taliban earlier today. "Look," Biden said in an interview in Newsweek, "the Taliban per se is not our enemy." Carney's response was a bit muddled. "I think it’s important . . . to understand what most Americans I think know which is that we did not invade Afghanistan, we did not send U.S. military personnel into Afghanistan because the Taliban were in power," Carney said....

The White House on Monday defended Vice President Joe Biden for saying that the Taliban isn't an enemy of the United States despite the years spent fighting the militant Islamic group that gave a home to Al Qaeda and its leader Usama bin Laden while he plotted the Sept. 11 terror attacks. "It's only regrettable when taken out of context," White House spokesman Jay Carney said of the vice president's remarks in an interview published Monday. "It is a simple fact that we went into Afghanistan because of the attack on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. We are...

The White House on Monday defended Vice President Joe Biden for saying that the Taliban isn't an enemy of the United States despite the years spent fighting the militant Islamic group that gave a home to Al Qaeda and its leader Usama bin Laden while he plotted the Sept. 11 terror attacks. "It's only regrettable when taken out of context," White House spokesman Jay Carney said of the vice president's remarks in an interview published Monday. "It is a simple fact that we went into Afghanistan because of the attack on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. We are...

First Obama and Biden wanted to work with what they called the "moderate Taliban." Even the Taliban thought that was ridiculous. And it was -- sort of like a chaste prostitute. The Taliban does not share Western values, goals, objectives. The Taliban's playbook is the qur'an and its stated aims. The whole idea of a moderate Taliban or a moderate Islam is false, and Obama knows it. So now, according to Biden, the Taliban is not our enemy at all. Never mind their role in 9/11. Never mind their hosting al-Qaeda camps and working with al-Qaeda. It amounts to surrender,...

On a Saturday in late October in Kabul, Afghanistan, a car carrying explosives rammed into an armored U.S. military bus, killing 13 Americans, including five soldiers and eight civilian staff. In August, a Chinook helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan, killing 30 Americans. Who was responsible? The Taliban. And who now says the Taliban is not America’s enemy? Vice President Joseph Biden. In an interview with Newsweek, Biden laid out his — and the Administration’s view — of the Taliban: Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy. That’s critical. There is not a single statement that the president...

(snip) (Karzai) "Last year, during my visit to Washington, in a very important briefing a day before I met U.S. President [Barack Obama], his national security adviser Tom Donilon, and senior White House officials, generals, and intelligence officials, the national security adviser met with me. He told me: "The Taliban are not our enemies and we don't want to fight them." "

In the last 17 months since the U.S. government financially blacklisted the Haqqani Network, one of the deadliest insurgent groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, not a single dollar associated with the group has been blocked or frozen, according to U.S. officials and one of the Congressman who oversees the Treasury Department’s financial war on terrorism. But it’s not just the Haqqanis—an ally today in the Taliban’s fight against U.S. troops and the Afghan government—who seem to have been spared from America’s economic attacks. According to a Treasury Department letter written in late November, not a single dollar been seized from...