America’s Concessions to the Taliban and Pakistan Only Encourage Terrorism

On Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the U.S. has come to “an understanding” with the Taliban, which he expects will soon result in a signed agreement and a withdrawal of American forces. Michael Rubin, citing as precedent the extensive negotiations with the Islamist group in the late 1990s—during which Washington received repeated assurances that Afghanistan would not become a safe haven for terrorists—is skeptical that the newest agreement will achieve its desired effect:

Here are the basic problems with the Taliban deal: the withdrawal [of U.S. forces] is not calibrated to the success of intra-Afghan dialogue; . . . there is no mechanism to prevent the Taliban from playing good-cop, bad-cop by simultaneously holding out an olive branch while ordering supposedly rogue units to attack—a tactic Iran has used for 40 years.

Worst of all, the agreement ignores Pakistan and its continuing efforts to undermine an elected Afghan government at peace with itself and its neighbors.

Meanwhile, adds Rubin, the Financial Action Task Force—an international body for combating money-laundering and terror finance—recently decided, at Washington’s urging, not to sanction Pakistan:

Rather than taking action against designated [terrorist] groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba—which calls Pakistan home and is responsible for a number of bombings and massacres, including the 2008 Mumbai attacks [on a hotel and Jewish center]—the Pakistani government instead sought to win exceptions for Lashkar-e-Taiba and its front groups. Rather than incarcerating terror leaders from Lashkar-e-Taiba, al-Qaeda, Islamic State, and the Haqqani Network, it simply created revolving-door justice, slapping sentences on them to appease foreign diplomats and to collect billions of dollars in aid, but then quietly letting them go just months later.

Pakistan looks at such actions and concludes that not only can it get away with murder, but that it can simultaneously get the Trump administration to pay it to do so. If Pakistan can host Osama bin Laden—and never hold any of its officials accountable for that duplicity—and support groups responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans and still face no consequences, then Islamabad has no incentive to stop supporting terrorism and extremist groups.

Read more at Washington Examiner

More about: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Taliban, U.S. Foreign policy, War on Terror

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society