Commentary The chaos unfolding in Afghanistan is the result of a failure of American strategy, intelligence, and will. As the lead member of the alliance against the Taliban, and as the lead country that sought to bring democracy to Afghanistan, the United States must take responsibility for its failure. The elements of that failure are many, but the ludicrous U.S. State Department’s failure to designate the Afghan Taliban as a terrorist organization is one of the worst. While the Afghan Taliban are not on the State Department terrorist organization list, the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is the Pakistani Taliban organization, is so designated. The failure to include the Afghan Taliban is due to a disastrous initiative to negotiate with them. Americans supposedly don’t negotiate with terrorists, and to make sure we supposedly don’t, we leave the ones we want to negotiate with off our State Department list. This foreign …