Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton indicated Wednesday that the Obama administration has jettisoned core elements of the so-called “Bush doctrine,” which held that those who harbor or sponsor terrorism are equally culpable for acts of terrorism.
“We do not in any way support the kind of extremists that you see,” Clinton said in an interview with Fox News. “What we are looking for is to separate out those who are, as we found in Iraq, part of an armed campaign for political reasons that can be reconcilable.”
Clinton pointed to efforts that got underway during the Bush administration to parse out some insurgent fighters with political and economic interests from those who were “hard core extremists and terrorists.”
“I think that the general principle that we don’t associate with these people is absolutely the same,” Clinton explained. “But the opportunity, as we found under the Bush administration, in Iraq, is worth exploring with those elements of the Taliban that are there because they pay better than the Afghan police force pays, for example.”
“We don’t do business with the terrorists, but we may do business with people who got swept up in some kind of move that doesn’t necessarily define their attitude toward the United States, or the use of violence,” Clinton added, characterizing the broader policy implications from the lessons in Iraq.