There is something bizarre about the leader of the free world, the President of the United States, coming on television and whitewashing the crimes of one of the most regressive, repressive, medieval forces the world has ever seen, the Taliban. It was incredible watching US President Joe Biden differentiating between the “good” Taliban terrorists and the “bad” ISIS-Khorasan terrorists who carried out the blasts at the Kabul airport, killing 13 US military personnel and several Afghans. It was as if the Taliban do not provide shelter to different terrorist groups; or as if the 6 August UNSC meeting on the situation in Afghanistan did not say that at least 20 terror groups, including ISIS and Al Qaeda were fighting alongside the Taliban. These are the same radicals who describe the US as the “great Satan” and chant “death to America”. But such is the rush to get US soldiers out of Afghanistan—resulting in complete chaos, terror attacks, deaths—that Joe Biden is ready to normalize these terrorists’ hostile takeover of Afghanistan as a legitimate movement. His administration even handed over to them the details of those who collaborated or worked with the US in their 20-year stay in that country. Armed with that list the Taliban are now targeting such people.
As if all this was not enough, the buzz is that the US President may even recognise the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate government. Single-handedly, not only will he undo the work that his fellow Americans did in Afghanistan for 20 years, trying to keep the Taliban at bay, but also dishonour the memory of both Americans and Afghans who laid down their lives in the conflict. And now even UNSC’s latest statement on the terror attack in Kabul dropped the reference to Taliban, when in its earlier statement, after the fall of Kabul, the radical militia had found a mention. Are we to assume that the P-5 countries are moving towards giving legitimacy to the Taliban’s military takeover of Afghanistan? It is difficult to understand President Biden’s compulsions for doing so at a time when US troops are out of Afghanistan. Is it a case of the so-called progressives of the Democratic party exercising their influence on the policy decisions of the administration? If so, sadly, the “progressives”—in reality, Wahhabi-supporting left radical fringe of the Democratic Party—are becoming mainstream.
Of course, any recognition to the Taliban is at present a matter of speculation. What is real is the support that the Taliban are getting from the Biden administration. This has to be seen in the context of what are known as American values of liberty, equality, individualism, diversity and unity, not one of which can be associated with the Taliban. And then to imagine these very same supporters and backers of the Taliban in the US will lecture India on human rights and democracy. The next time any piece of writing on “India’s lack of democratic values” is published in western legacy media, they should be reminded that by not putting the Biden administration on the dock for its capitulation on the Taliban issue, by naively believing that the Taliban and the ISIS-Khorasan are different, by not questioning Pakistan’s role in the whole tragedy even once, they and their leaders have lost the moral right to say even one word about the world’s largest democracy. In fact, this applies also to other Nato countries that are trying to propagate that the Taliban have changed for the better, UK being one such example. Such a narrative will not hide the fact that they have left Afghans to their own fate. After giving the Afghans some semblance of normalcy, they have unleashed on them monsters who speak the language of the gun and repression and will take the people back to the dark ages. Hence, no lectures to India on human rights will be tolerated.
