Reporter Lara Logan Says Taliban and Al Qaeda Stronger Than Ever

Lara Logan was the South African CBS news journalist who was beaten and sexually assaulted in Cairo's Tahrir Square during the post Arab Spring celebrations after Hosni Mubarak's resignation.  A top notch war correspondent who has reported from most of the major hotspots in the Middle East and Africa, including Iraq and the battlefields of Afghanistan, she knows whereof she speaks.

Logan was the keynote speaker at the Better Government Association annual luncheon, and she had some sobering words for the 1,100 movers and shakers in politics, government, the legal and corporate world in attendance, including Laura Washington from the Chicago Sun-Times.  Our enemies are as strong as ever, and we're being lied to by our government.

Washington felt a little "queasy" that as a journalist Logan was stepping out from telling the story to being the story, but the speech frightened her "as an American."

According to Ms. Washington, Logan told the captive audience that:

Eleven years later, “they” still hate us, now more than ever, Logan told the crowd. The Taliban and al-Qaida have not been vanquished, she added. They’re coming back.

“I chose this subject because, one, I can’t stand, that there is a major lie being propagated . . .” Logan declared in her native South African accent.

The lie is that America’s military might has tamed the Taliban.

“There is this narrative coming out of Washington for the last two years,” Logan said. It is driven in part by “Taliban apologists,” who claim “they are just the poor moderate, gentler, kinder Taliban,” she added sarcastically. “It’s such nonsense!”

Logan stepped way out of the “objective,” journalistic role. The audience was riveted as she told of plowing through reams of documents, and interviewing John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan; Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and a Taliban commander trained by al-Qaida. The Taliban and al-Qaida are teaming up and recruiting new terrorists to do us deadly harm, she reports.

She also blasted the U.S. government for

.... downplaying the strength of our enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a rationale of getting us out of the longest war. We have been lulled into believing that the perils are in the past: “You’re not listening to what the people who are fighting you say about this fight. In your arrogance, you think you write the script.”

Our enemies are writing the story, she suggests, and there’s no happy ending for us.

Logan also wants the U.S. to "exact revenge"  for the murders of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, and the three other US. officials in Libya, in order to

".. let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil. That its ambassadors will not be murdered, and that the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.”

Good luck with that.

Although Ms. Washington mentions that "in the good old days, reporters did not advocate, crusade or call for revenge",  she also gives kudos to Logan for breaking those journalistic rules in a post-9/11 world.

I would venture to say that to most of us non-liberals, Logan's words are nothing new. Those of us who don't have our heads buried in the proverbial sand know that our enemies have not slipped off into the sunset to commune with their camels and six wives. It doesn't take a genius to see that the Taliban have no intention of integrating into Afghan society, so have no desire for  peace. For some reason Obama and his minions are in denial about the war on terror, which makes it doubly important that he does not get a second term.