On 28 January’s\u00a0press briefing,\u00a0White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest and Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz refused to call Taliban a terrorist organization.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey do carry out tactics that are akin to terrorism. They do pursue terror attacks in an effort to try to advance their agenda,\u201d<\/em> White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest explained, but \u201cthey have a different classification.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Earnest further explained, because they are \u201cdifferent than an organization like Al-Qaeda that has a much broader global aspiration to carry out acts of violence and acts of terror against Americans and American interests all around the globe.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Deputy press secretary Eric Schultz also wouldn’t call the Taliban a terrorist group, instead referring to it as “an armed insurgency.”<\/p>\n “The Taliban is still conducting terrorist attacks. You can’t really say the war has ended as far as they are concerned,” ABC’s Jonathan Karl said at the briefing.<\/p>\n “Well, I’d also point out that the Taliban is an armed insurgency, ISIL is a terrorist group. So, we don’t make concessions to terrorist groups,” Schultz said.<\/p>\n “You don’t think the Taliban is a terrorist group?” Karl asked.<\/p>\n “I don’t think that the Taliban, um, uh — the Taliban is an armed insurgency. This was the winding down of the war in Afghanistan and that’s why this arrangement was dealt,” Schultz responded.<\/p>\n ABC<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On 28 January’s\u00a0press briefing,\u00a0White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest and Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz refused to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":935,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,125],"tags":[106,15,10,11,7],"class_list":["post-934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-united-states","tag-al-qaeda","tag-militants","tag-taliban","tag-terrorism","tag-u-s"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Eric-Schultz.jpg?fit=620%2C350&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7jJWb-f4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=934"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":942,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934\/revisions\/942"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}