Ten years ago, I was with the U.S. Army in an interrogation room at the detention facility in Parwan, Afghanistan. Through a translator, I asked the captured Taliban commander sitting before me how long he intended to keep fighting us. “You have me in a cage; my fight is over for now,” he said. “But my children will fight you, and if they don’t win, their children will fight you. If it takes a thousand years, we will win.”
Our enemies are focused on fighting the long-term war against the West, continuously educating the next generation to pick up the torch. In fact, Taliban is the Pashto word for “students,” named after the graduates of the schools the Taliban and their allied groups run where children are indoctrinated to become fighters in the jihadist cause.
We must educate our youth about our history and who our enemies are, or others will do it with a distorted version of the facts.
In 2021, when the Taliban rolled…
