The United States has said that the Taliban are not the enemy of Washington, a move seen as the latest effort of the Obama administration to extend an olive branch to the terrorist outfit that ruled Afghanistan before 9/11, media reports said on Tuesday. “Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy. That’s critical,” US Vice President Joe Biden said in an interview with Newsweek magazine. “There is not a single statement that the (US) president has ever made in any of our policy assertions that the Taliban is our enemy because it threatens US interests,” he said.
“If, in fact, the Taliban is able to collapse the existing government, which is cooperating with us in keeping the bad guys from being able to do damage to us, then that becomes a problem for us. So there’s a dual track here,” Biden added. Biden outlined a plan for the US. “One, continue to keep the pressure on al Qaeda and continue to diminish them. Two, put the government in a position where they can be strong enough that they can negotiate with and not be overthrown by the Taliban,” he said. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, supporting Biden’s statement, said the vice president did not regret having said this. “We didn’t invade Afghanistan. We did not send US military personnel into Afghanistan because the Taliban were in power. They had been in power. We went into Afghanistan because al Qaeda had launched an attack against the US from Afghanistan,” he said.