Opinion

The worst day for counterterrorism since 9/11

Sept. 11, 2001, was a national tragedy, the most consequential attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor. The Clinton administration had negotiated with the Taliban and accepted the radical group’s counterterrorism assurances. The deaths of almost 3,000 people in New York City, 125 people at the Pentagon, and 265 more onboard the hijacked airplanes underscored the fallacy of that approach. The Taliban violated both its agreement to quarantine al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and to close its terror training camps.

The agreement which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Friday represents willful amnesia and magical thinking. It is compounded by the U.S. government’s deliberate undermining of Afghanistan’s elected government and, more recently, its electoral process, by ignoring massive fraud in order to avoid a second round in presidential elections.

Here are the basic problems with the Taliban deal: Withdrawal is not calibrated to the success of intra-Afghan dialogue. The Taliban are not a unitary organization, and there is no mechanism to prevent the Taliban from playing good-cop-bad-cop by simultaneously holding out an olive branch while ordering supposedly rogue units to attack.