Allies: Joe Biden And The Taliban

The Taliban agrees with Joe Biden.

Vice President Joe Biden has been taking heat this week for a controversial Newsweek interview, in which he said ‘the Taliban per se is not our enemy.’ But one group welcoming the Veep’s comments? The Taliban themselves. Reached by The Daily Beast in Afghanistan, several senior Taliban leaders say they saw the comment as a positive sign. ‘Biden’s statement shows that the U.S. is finally seeing us after 10 years of war with a cool head, not with emotion and cries for revenge that drove the US after 9/11,’ says Khazi Habibullah Fauzi, who served as the Taliban’s charge d’affaires in Saudi Arabia before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

If nothing else, Joe Biden got the attention of the Afghan insurgents. “Look,” the U.S. vice president tells Newsweek’s Leslie H. Gelb in the magazine’s latest issue, “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.” Active and former members of the group’s senior leadership have one question: why didn’t the White House say so sooner?

So does The Daily Beast for that matter. Anybody want to run this by the soldiers in the field who are getting suicide bombed and shot at?