One man's moderate...

Our President Barack Obama wants to meet with "moderate" Taliban, you know, the terrorists who blew up the WTC? The ones who wouldn't even let starving widows work in Afghanistan? Tunku Varadarajan, Forbes on the moderates he knew. Here's one:

The second moderate Talib I met was a man called Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, the Taliban's roving cultural ambassador in the aftermath of the destruction--on the orders of the mullahs--of two ancient statues of the Buddha at Bamiyan, in Afghanistan. Hashemi had come to meet the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, where I was an op-ed editor, and we gathered eagerly around him in a conference room to hear what he had to say. Breathtakingly, he offered a defense of the destruction, which I wrote up for the paper. One statement he made bears quoting in full:

You'll want to read this. And here's the story on the Buddhas being blown up. The statues dated back to the 2nd-5th century A.D.