Notwithstanding that there are still thousands of American troops in harm’s way in Afghanistan and that it is a ripe dead certainty the five jihadist commanders with which President Obama has just replenished the Taliban will go back to the anti-American jihad—indeed, at least one of them is already bragging that he will do so—former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told NBC news Wednesday that the Taliban Five were not really a threat to the United States.
Mrs. Clinton, who also did not see much of a threat from the anti-American jihadists in Benghazi, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and the al Qaeda-affiliated Boko Haram terrorists in Nigeria during her tenure at the State Department, complained that it was critics of the administration who “were kind of missing the bigger picture here.” You see, “these five guys are not a threat to the United States. They are a threat to the safety and security of Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
It was during the Bill Clinton administration that the Taliban was established, took over Afghanistan, and gave safe haven to al Qaeda. That was the arrangement that enabled bin Laden’s network to have a secure headquarters, expansive training camps, and the capacity to carry out attacks on American targets—including the bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, and ultimately the 9/11 atrocities. As Tom Joscelyn has demonstrated, the five jihadist commanders Mrs. Clinton does not see as a threat to American national security were key players in cementing the alliance between the Taliban and al Qaeda.
Adopting Mrs. Clinton’s own reasoning, I don’t see the, shall we say, remarkable judgment she exhibited at the State Department as a threat to her presidential ambitions, not at all.
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Related at The Grid: Hillary: I Might Not Run for President, and Here’s Why
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