Biden: 'The Taliban Per Se Is Not Our Enemy'

In an interview with Leslie Gelb in Newsweek, Vice President Joe Biden says: 

Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy. That’s critical. There is not a single statement that the president has ever made in any of our policy assertions that the Taliban is our enemy because it threatens U.S. interests. If, in fact, the Taliban is able to collapse the existing government, which is cooperating with us in keeping the bad guys from being able to do damage to us, then that becomes a problem for us.

Via Ben Smith. Interestingly, in the rest of the interview on foreign policy, Biden and Gelb never discuss that just a few years ago they co-wrote a proposal to partition Iraq into three separate nations. Fortunately, their advice was ignored at the time. And Biden this time only says he would "look for" an "Iraq united."