The United States may negotiate prisoner swaps with the Taliban because, according to Obama White House spokesman, it is not a "terrorist group."
Drawing out a controversial distinction between Afghanistan's Taliban and the Islamic State,
deputy press secretary Eric Schultz described the former group as an "armed insurgency" during Wednesday's press briefing, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
"The Taliban is an armed insurgency. ISIL is a terrorist group, so we don't make concessions to terrorist groups," Schultz said on Wednesday.
The controversial remarks were made after ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl asked Schultz why the U.S. opposes Jordanian government's announcement that it would make a deal with ISIS to win freedom for a captured pilot when the U.S. itself had traded five Taliban members last year to secure the release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.
"As you know, this was highly discussed at the time and prisoner swaps are a traditional end-of-conflict interaction that happens," Schultz said. "As the war in Afghanistan wound down, we felt like it was the appropriate thing to do. The president's bedrock commitment as commander in chief is to leave no man or woman behind. That's the principle he was operating under."
"The two groups are different," Shultz said, "because Islamic State is a terrorist group currently operating in Syria and Iraq."
But Karl pointed out that even the Taliban continue to carry out terrorist attacks, so "you can't really say the war has ended as far as they're concerned." In December, terrorists of the Pakistan Taliban attacked a school in Peshawar in Pakistan, killing 150 people, mostly children, according to the Associated Press.
"You don't think the Taliban's a terrorist group?" Karl persisted, noting that the Taliban has been responsible for killing thousands of civilians over the years.
"I don't think that the Taliban...the Taliban is an armed insurgency," Schultz repeated. "This was the winding down of the war in Afghanistan, and that's why this arrangement was dealt."
However, the comments were described as being ridiculous by Rep. Duncan Hunter, a member of the House Armed Services Committee and a Marine Corps veteran who saw combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"It's all semantics," the California Republican told Fox News. "The White House screwed up on the Bergdahl trade, plain and simple, and now they want justify their actions by splitting hairs on how they compare the Taliban to ISIS."
The White House refusal to call it a terrorist group is "more nonsense from an administration that seems to have lost its sense of reality," he added.
The latest comments show that the U.S. might be leaving the door open for future talks with the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan until it was overthrown by American forces in 2001 after 9/11, CBS News reported.
Meanwhile, the State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations does not list the Taliban but includes the Pakistani Tehreek-e-Taliban. Since 2002, the Afghan Taliban has been listed on a separate Specially Designated Global Terrorist list.
