Don’t ask Barack Hussein Obama, he doesn’t seem to know.

The U.S. goal in Afghanistan “is not to build a country in America’s image, or to eradicate every vestige of the Taliban,” President Obama told Americans Tuesday night in a prime-time address from Bagram Air Base in Kabul.

(My emphasis above)

Tell me then, Mister President, if it’s not our goal to eradicte the Taliban, root and branch, why are we even over there? Didn’t you listen when George W. Bush briefed you prior to his moving back to Texas and you moving into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

If we don’t completely and summarily kick the Taliban’s butt, they and their al-Qaeda pals will only fight their way back to the status quo they enjoyed before we invaded post 9/11, and the Afghanis will once again be enslaved by an oppressive fundamentalist regime while we, once again, have a homeland security threat poised to commit terrorist acts just like they did that terrible morning in New York and at the Pentagon, headquartered in a country on the other side of the world.

Wolf, who has been to Afghanistan, once told me that while there are a lot of Afghani tribes “in country” who subscribe to the stone-age fundamentalism espoused by the Taliban, there are many more in Kabul and other, more “civilized” areas that prefer to exist in the modern world with the kind of freedom to which every human being is entitled.

We can neither pull out completely while there are Taliban cells left intact, nor “negotiate” any kind of truce with that evil entity.

To do either would be to have wasted all those U.S. and allied military lives and all that treasure, only to find the same threat to us lurking in Afghanistan shortly thereafter.

Hours later, Taliban fighters — reportedly disguised in burqas — attacked a compound housing foreign contractors in Kabul, killing at least seven people. The Taliban said the attack was a response to Obama’s surprise visit.

This was the second major attack in Kabul in less than three weeks, and it demonstrates the Taliban’s continued ability to strike in the heavily guarded capital even at a time of heightened security because of President Obama’s visit, the Associated Press reported.

See? As soon as you announced that you weren’t ready to wipe these terrorists out to a man, they showed how naive you really are.

You are as much an embarrassment to we, the people as president, Mr. Obama, as Jimmy Carter was.