Twenty years, and we are still where we were on September 10, 2001.
Twenty years, and we are still where we were on September 10, 2001.
A ccountability for the Capitol rioters is not enough, we’re told. Progressives insist there must be a national reckoning for the January 6 “insurrection” because punishing the rioters is insufficient to defeat the real enemy — white supremacism and its endorsement of terrorism when necessary to achieve its vision for society.
It is a cartoon depiction of reality. No belief system is held in more disdain in the United States than white supremacism. To most of us, it is a perversion of the core conviction that we are all created in God’s image, all equal in human dignity, and must thus all be equal in the eyes of the law. For the Left, though, white supremacism is a convenient abstraction; one that gives opportunists the foundation needed to build a “systemic racism” dystopia, their path to influence and profit.
What is remarkable, then, is the perdurable blindness of progressives to a much more threatening breed of ideologically driven violence in furtherance of a supremacist, incorrigibly discriminatory vision for society. Not white supremacism but sharia supremacism. They’ve never wanted to acknowledge it, much less come to grips with it.
As a result, the inevitable is coming to pass, in all the horror some of us have long warned about. The Taliban are right on schedule in their quest to retake Afghanistan by September 11, the 20-year anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities executed by al-Qaeda — a jihadist network to which the Taliban knowingly and willfully gave sanctuary as it plotted against, and repeatedly attacked, the United States.
I’ve noted that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are poised, by the anniversary date, to be as strong as they were in the three years leading up to 9/11 — during which, with its safe havens assured by the sharia-supremacist regime, the jihadist network bombed U.S. embassies in eastern Africa and nearly sank a U.S. Navy destroyer. Actually, I understated the matter. As they swallow up more provinces by the day, the Taliban are capturing northern regions that they did not rule when last in charge. It is all part of a longstanding plan to take over Afghanistan while U.S. forces are still a retreating presence, thus projecting the image of the Taliban chasing out a humiliated enemy — an image President Biden seems even more anxious to mint than was President Trump.
Can you imagine, then, what a laugh the Taliban must have gotten over U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad’s farcical admonition, echoed by Biden spokeswoman Jen Psaki, that if the Taliban don’t stop doing what they’ve been telling everyone they’d do for 20 years — i.e., defeat the United States, steamroll the American-backed joke of a government in Kabul, and retake the country — the U.S. will see to it that they are denied . . . yes . . . international legitimacy?
Never mind that China, Russia, and Iran are already embracing the Taliban — the better to rub Washington’s nose in it when Kabul collapses. As Khalilzad well knows, the Taliban got along just fine without international legitimacy when they last ran the place. Back then, they were recognized by Saudi Arabia, the font of Sunni sharia supremacism (from which hailed al-Qaeda emir Osama bin Laden, not to mention 15 of the 19 suicide-hijackers), the Saudis’ sidekicks in the United Arab Emirates, and our “ally” Pakistan, which, with the blessing of the Clinton administration, spawned the Taliban as a geopolitical weapon, mainly against India. That was more than enough.
The Taliban are not like Professor Khalilzad’s former colleagues in the Columbia faculty lounge. They do not crave international legitimacy. They find the very concept, redolent of Western global dominance, to be anathema. They’ve never wanted to be us. They define themselves as the anti-us.
The name Taliban means students. What they are students of is sharia, Islam’s ancient legal code and societal framework, as fundamentalists have construed it since the tenth century. The Taliban perceive legitimacy by nothing other than what they take to be sharia’s immutable terms.
One American administration after another has believed it could suppress jihadist terrorism and democratize the Muslim Middle East by either ignoring or coopting sharia. Islam’s fundamental law, however, is the rationale for jihadism and the implacable basis for Islamic resistance to Western law and mores. In his Wilsonian turn, President George W. Bush insisted that “the desire for freedom resides in every human heart.” But the beating heart of fundamentalist Islamic cultures is sharia — in Arabic, the “path” — which leads to the ideal of total submission to Allah. That ideal is essentially the opposite of the freedom that President Bush had in mind, right down to its rejection of a wall of separation between the spiritual and political realms.
Over the last 20 years, I’ve elaborated on the heinousness of sharia supremacism more times than I care to count. (See, e.g., here.) My purpose has not been to sow discord — quite the opposite. It has been to urge that we resist sociological experiments in democracy-promotion that do not have a prayer of working but that inexorably sap public support for defense measures — such as denying safe haven to jihadists — that are essential to national security and to the prevention of such catastrophes as 9/11.
White supremacism did not cause the Capitol riot, nor is it indicative of systemic racism in the United States. But sharia supremacism did cause 9/11. It is also the reason militant organizations such as the Taliban, al-Qaeda, ISIS (a breakaway faction of al-Qaeda), and Hezbollah (the Iran-backed Shiite instantiation of the revolutionary jihadism) exist. If every one of those organizations were dismantled, jihadism would still exist. New jihadist factions would arise, and would continue targeting the West, because the animating ideology, sharia supremacism, would remain alive and well.
Khalilzad, a very bright and well-meaning humanitarian, is unfortunate to be the embodiment of our imminent defeat.
He was the Bush administration diplomat who oversaw the drafting of the “new” Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution. It is a monument to the delusion that sharia and Western liberty are perfectly compatible — at least, that’s what Americans were told, while the constitution itself took pains to make sharia the principal law of the land. Naturally, Ambassador Khalilzad was among those most shocked when apostates continued to be sentenced to death, though such sentences were perfectly compatible with the constitution, notwithstanding its lip-service to civil rights and social justice.
Seamlessly, Khalilzad became the Trump envoy in charge of selling the fantasy that we could confidently pull forces out of Afghanistan because the Taliban would now turn on their steadfast al-Qaeda ally. That, by the way, was the same Taliban with which Khalilzad (like the Obama State Department before him) negotiated even though the Taliban refused to acknowledge the Kabul government that we’d spent over 2,000 lives and a trillion dollars standing up. The same Taliban that Khalilzad and the State Department deferentially accepted as the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” — even though State insisted, of course, that the U.S. does not “recognize” such a regime.
The Clinton administration looked the other way at the Taliban’s creation, and did nothing about their harboring of al-Qaeda. The Bush administration insisted that the Taliban were not our enemy, and its State Department declined to designate the Taliban as a terrorist organization. The Obama administration elevated the Taliban into a peace-partner worthy of negotiations even as the Taliban colluded with Iran and al-Qaeda in operations against American troops. The Trump administration pretended that you could end a “forever war” without losing to the Taliban by simply leaving — even as officials knew they needed to mislead Americans about the Taliban’s intentions and loyalties. And now the Biden administration gets to preside over what will be the most shameful American moment on the world stage since the fall of Saigon in 1975.
Through it all, the Taliban — which could have stayed in power had they just agreed to hand over al-Qaeda leaders after 9/11, but wouldn’t — never wavered in their hostility to the United States, their vows that they would ultimately win, and their conviction that a superpower fearful of condemning the ideology that catalyzes its opposition is not serious about fighting.
Twenty years . . . and we are still where we were on September 10, 2001.