Back in May, while disagreeing with the Obama administration’s knee-jerk decision to treat the would-be Times Square bomber as a criminal defendant rather than an enemy combatant, I pointed out that the administration might have had a good legal argument. That was because Faisal Shahzad appeared to be connected to the Pakistani Taliban (something that has since been corroborated). It’s not clear that Taliban operatives qualify for enemy treatment.
To be an enemy combatant, an operative must be affiliated with the enemy we are fighting in a war. Yet, though we have been at this for nearly nine years now, though Americans have been told we need to continue the fight in Afghanistan because the Taliban must be defeated, though the Pakistani Taliban is closely linked to the Afghan Taliban, and though the Pakistani Taliban is plainly plotting to attack our homeland, Congress has never amended the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) enacted after 9/11. The AUMF does not expressly name either Taliban organization, much less both of them, as enemies. Nor does it name other jihadist organizations targeting our forces, such as the Haqqani Network and Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (the faction of Gilbuddin Hekmatyar, whom I discussed in Tuesday’s column).
It gets worse. Yesterday, after three months of delay, the State Department finally issued its congressionally mandated annual terrorism report. It shows that the United States has not even designated the Taliban as a terrorist organization — not in Afghanistan, not in Pakistan. Similarly, the government has also failed to designate both the Haqqani Network and HIG. (Hekmatyar himself, in his individual capacity, has been designated as a “global terrorist” since 2003.)
The full list of designated terrorist organizations is here. The designation is very important, and not just because it stands as a formal declaration by our government. Providing material support to an organization once it has been designated a serious federal crime — and prosecution for it helps us starve terror organizations of resources, making it harder for those organizations to attack our country. Yet, as you can see, the State Department does not list the Taliban organizations with which we are at war, even though it continues to list the Basques, the Tamil Tigers, Kahane Chai (an Israeli group that disbanded about 16 years ago), a renegade wing of the Irish Republican Army, and several other groups that have nothing to do with anti-American terrorism.
This is bizarre. Here is part of State’s reporting on Afghanistan:
… Afghanistan continued to … face … a sophisticated, multi-faceted insurgency that primarily relied on asymmetric tactics. The insurgency targeted coalition forces, the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA), international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), foreign diplomatic missions, Afghan government officials and security forces, and Afghan civilians.
Separate but intertwined and affiliated extremist organizations led by Mullah Omar (Taliban), Sirajuddin Haqqani (Haqqani Network), and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin – HIG) increased their use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and coordinated attacks using multiple suicide bombers, resulting in an increase from 2008 in overall casualties. The Taliban, in particular, stepped up the pace of its attacks and simultaneously increased its shadow government presence throughout the country. Al-Qa’ida (AQ) and the Taliban senior leadership maintained an operational relationship, but AQ’s direct influence in Afghanistan has diminished over the past year due to effective counterterrorism operations.
The report goes on to describe how – besides targeting our troops, the Afghan government, and foreign diplomats – these organizations are mass-murdering civilians (with particular attention to young girls attending school).
The Pakistan section of the report catalogues an array of horrors carried out by the Pakistani Taliban and other groups, such as Lashkar-i-Islam (also not designated). (Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, which carried out the 2008 attacks in Bombay — now “Mumbai” — and mainly targets India, has been designated since 2001.) State’s report also offhandedly refers to Pakistani Taliban honchos as “terrorists” who have “jockeyed for power” since the death of their leader Baitullah Mehsud. But it does not mention the attempted Times Square attack. I presume this is because, though the attempt happened months ago, this report is supposed to cover 2009. (The section on Yemen does recount the Christmas 2009 attempt by al Qaeda operative Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up a plane over Detroit.)
Why has our government failed to declare that the Taliban branches, the Haqqani Network, and HIG are both terrorist organizations and our enemies in the war? If they are sinister enough for us to commit our troops to fight them, shouldn’t we be taking every legal step to support that effort?
