Members of the Biden administration, aiming to wash their hands of the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle, are attempting to portray the Taliban as a terror-fighting group. 

Even as the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Michael McCaul, argues that the group has done nothing to alter its status as a terrorist threat, saying in a statement Monday that he “will not allow” President Biden to normalize relations with the Taliban, the administration claims the group is fulfilling the agreements it made to fight terrorists in Afghanistan. 

The discrepancy arose during a hearing last week in Mr. McCaul’s committee on the renewal of the 2001 Authorization of the Use of Military Force. Administration officials argued that Taliban-ruled Afghanistan should be exempt from the AUMF, in effect ending the possibility of any future military operation there. 

Even supporters of muscular operations against global terrorists increasingly doubt the AUMF’s utility, arguing that it allows presidents to launch military operations with no scrutiny, which in effect erodes public support for the war on terror.

During the Thursday hearing, administration officials claimed that the Taliban is meeting its counterterrorism obligations under the Doha agreement, which preceded the chaotic August 2021 evacuation. The group now in control of the county is “working to defeat ISIS-K,” according to the officials. 

The Khorasan province’s offshoot of the Islamic State, known as ISIS-K, operates in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, and is considered a rival of other Sunni Islamist militants. As such, the Taliban may be fighting that one terrorist group but doing so on behalf of another, Mr. McCaul says. 

“The Taliban is working with their allies Al Qaeda to defeat their shared enemy, ISIS-K, as part of an internal struggle for power that has been going on since 2014,” Mr. McCaul says. “The Taliban have never cut ties with Al Qaeda,” which is globally recognized as a terror organization, and is listed as such in America as well. 

“If the Taliban were truly upholding their counterterrorism obligations, they would work to defeat Al Qaeda instead of paying, protecting, and employing them,” Mr. McCaul added. “The Biden administration is trying to hide this fact from the American people so the Taliban can be excluded from a future AUMF as part of a broader effort to normalize relations with them.”

Additionally, an acting undersecretary of state, Victoria Nuland, denied in the hearing that the Taliban are taking revenge on locals who have assisted America in the Afghanistan war. “I don’t believe that we’ve seen a consistent pattern of those Afghans who worked and supported our efforts in Afghanistan being murdered by the Taliban,” she said. 

That is “grossly inaccurate,” Mr. McCaul retorted, saying there are thousands of confirmed reports of violence committed by the Taliban against Afghans who have worked with America.

While Mr. McCaul’s opposition to exempting Afghanistan from the renewed AUMF, on which his committee is expected to vote in November, opponents wonder about the utility of the authorization that was originally enacted in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in America. 

In addition to exempting the Taliban, administration officials argue that a president no longer needs the AUMF. President Biden “has repeatedly warned Iran that we will hold them to account for any role in attacks against U.S. personnel,” Ms. Nuland said. He did so on numerous occasions without relying on the AUMF, “and he’s not going to hesitate to do that again,” she added.  

While critics note that Mr. Biden’s response to Iran-backed terrorism has been timid at best, they do increasingly doubt that the AUMF is indeed the right tool to fight terrorism. First employed by the second President Bush, the broad authorization has been used by consecutive presidents to launch operations in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere. 

“The administration wants to end the AUMF to say the war on terror is over,” even though it clearly is not, the editor of the Long War Journal, Bill Ruggio, tells the Sun. Yet, he adds, the authorization has allowed Mr. Bush and his successors — Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden — to send troops to all corners of the world even as they failed to make public cases for such deployments.

America has up to 400 troops fighting ISIS in Syria, and about 700 troops are facing terrorists in Somalia. Mr. Obama launched a drone-led war to assassinate ISIS and Al Qaeda leaders in Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere. A $100 million military base was built in Niger to fight terrorists in the Sahel region, even as a coup has recently changed leadership there, endangering the American presence. 

The public is mostly unaware of such deployments. Rather than enhancing terror-fighting capabilities, a blank authorization has allowed presidents to act unilaterally. Ironically, the practice has strengthened the narratives of those who call to “end endless wars.”

“We lost Afghanistan because consecutive administrations did not engage,” Mr. Ruggio says. “If a president wants to get involved in a conflict, he should make a case to Congress and to the public.”