US ‘Does Not Support Organized Violent Opposition to the Taliban’

US wants stability in Afghanistan

Having lost the Afghanistan War outright, the US State Department is now saying that their goal is to see the Taliban give rise to a stable and sustainable Afghanistan, and that as such they do not support organized violence against them.

It’s not just not supporting violence against the Taliban, but “discourage other powers from doing so as well.” The Taliban isn’t facing huge opposition, but the most likely would be the groups that were US-backed up to their outright defeat.

This is an awkward position, with the US spending decades positioning the Taliban is irredeemable villains and now warning anyone against resisting their rule,  which was secured purely through routing the failed US-back government.

It’s not unusual for the US to back the continued rule of a group that’s objectively bad. Before the 2001 US invasion of the Taliban, the US was cheerfully backing them, subsidizing them and praising them for being reliable anti-drug partners. The US may be looking to roll things back to the comfortable old days of protecting the Islamist Taliban.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.