Turkey: NATO's Pro-Russian, Taliban-Friendly Ally
by Burak Bekdil • September 24, 2021 at 5:00 am
Around the Taliban, and in a bizarre combination of convergence of interests and ideological kinship, a new anti-Western circle is evolving, including a willing NATO member state.... anti-Western sentiments are bringing together these regional powers, who are now courting Afghanistan's radical rulers.
The hard lesson learned from relying on an "ally" for critical production, then needing to reshore that capability as politics change, ultimately will cost U.S. taxpayers between $500 million and $600 million in nonrecurring engineering costs, according to Ellen Lord, the previous Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition.
U.S. President Joe Biden's Afghan drama will spur a number of anti-Western alliances based on different anti-Western calculations. Proof? Just look at the names of the countries on Taliban's invitation list for its birthday party.
The Taliban, since its founding in 1994, has been using the most notorious shariah-based law enforcement, including beheadings, stoning women to death, forcing burqas on women, killing girls who are students, gang-raping, locking women in their homes and various other medieval practices. Now, for the first time in NATO's history, a member nation's president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has said that the Taliban's interpretation of Islam does not contradict Turkey's.
