People cling to a U.S. Air Force jet in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Monday, Aug. 16, 2021. (Video screenshot)

The Taliban has won its battle for Afghanistan, with President Biden’s decision to pull American troops out and turn the region over to the terror group, which also got tens of billions of dollars worth of American war machinery and many, many potential hostages.
That’s bad enough.
But now a warning has been issued against anyone in the West trying to further appease and pacify the terror organization – with any sort of official or international recognition.
That’s because the Taliban of today is essentially the same as the Taliban that protected al-Qaida while it planned the 9/11 attack that killed nearly 3,000.

“Having appointed a number of prominent militants to senior positions in the new Taliban administration, the Taliban has now been accused of sending death squads to capture and kill former members of the Afghan security forces,” he explained. “Recent reports claim that at least four elite Afghan counterterrorism agents have been hunted down and killed by the Taliban during the past three weeks, in one case pulling out all the victim’s fingernails before shooting him.”
The victims reportedly were part of the team that was trained by British and American forces to find and question Taliban members – before Biden’s pullout.
Coughlin noted that the concerns about international recognition have been raised by, among others, former U.S. National Security Advisor HR McMaster.
He explained there is no “moderate” Taliban, even though its leaders make that claim.
“We have to stop pretending that the Taliban have changed.” he said. “Our self-delusion has led many to embrace an Orwellian reversal of morality in which they view jihadist terrorists as a partner.
“We know who they are, how they are recruited and why they are dangerous. The Taliban are determined to impose a brutal form of Shariah on the Afghan people and are intertwined with terrorists determined to continue their jihad against all who do not conform to their perverted interpretation of Islam.”
After the Taliban’s takeover, several Western leaders suggested a working relationship was possible – after Taliban leaders said they might want a more moderate government than the outright terrorism of the late 1990s.
“In the aftermath of the Islamist movement’s takeover of the country, Taliban leaders were at pains to stress their plans to establish a more moderate approach,” Coughlin wrote. “In their first press conference after seizing control of the country, the movement’s leaders promised to protect women’s rights, guarantee media freedom, and offered a nationwide amnesty for government officials and military personnel in the former government of President Ashraf Ghani, which collapsed in disarray following U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to end US military support.”
But that “moderate tone” hasn’t been supported by any such action, and the column warned against believing there would be any.
“Certainly, to judge by the Taliban’s increasingly uncompromising behavior since seizing power last month, there is little evidence to suggest that the Islamist militants are prepared to adopt a more conciliatory approach to governing the Afghan people, an attitude that must be taken into account before European leaders make the disastrous mistake of providing Afghanistan’s new Islamist regime with international legitimacy,” he wrote.