There will be more attacks on American and allied troops in Afghanistan like the one that
killed a U.S. general on Tuesday, says former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy.
That's because the Taliban wants to make it appear they are chasing America out of the country, McCarthy said Tuesday on Fox News Channel's
"The Kelly File."
The State Department won't designate the Taliban as a terrorist organization because they are negotiating with the Taliban, McCarthy said, which he believes will lay the groundwork for the Taliban to retake Afghanistan.
That will make the takeover look like a negotiated solution rather than a coup, he said. The Taliban ran Afghanistan before American troops entered the country just after 9/11.
"It looks like we really don't want to take them on," McCarthy said. "They want to make it look like they're chasing us out of Afghanistan. So I think the longer this goes on the more of these kinds of attacks we're going to see."
Major General Harold Greene was killed and more than a dozen others were wounded in the Tuesday attack in Kabul by a man believed to be an Afghan soldier.
Such insider attacks are not rare, McCarthy noted, explaining that there were more than three dozen of them two years ago and about 16 last year.
While the Obama administration is touting that "core al-Qaida" is getting weaker, global jihadism must be fought on larger scale, he added. Muslim extremists share a common ideology and cannot be chopped up into smaller pieces, he said.
"You can either defeat it or you can try to manage it. What we've tried to do in Afghanistan is manage it," McCarthy said.
It is impossible to defeat al-Qaida and the Taliban just in Afghanistan when they are getting funding and support from outside, he noted.
"They're the strong horse," he said, "and they're just biding their time till we leave."
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