This is a video of a speech given by Lara Logan, the CBS reporter assaulted in Tahir Square in Cairo. What she is explaining is that far from the Taliban and Al Qaeda being on the run, they are coming back more powerfully than ever and they are posing an ever greater threat to the West. And she would know, and because she is an absolute insider in media networks, she will have more than a normal level of influence on the coming debates on American foreign policy and not incidentally on media reporting of the Obama administration. I don’t know whether she would have spoken as she does before her horrific personal experience but however she felt then, she is certainly clear eyed today.

There is a quite full report in The Chicago Sun Times with this extended quote from the speech:

Her ominous and frightening message was gleaned from years of covering our wars in the Middle East. She arrived in Chicago on the heels of her Sept. 30 report, ‘The Longest War.’ It examined the Afghanistan conflict and exposed the perils that still confront America, 11 years after 9/11.

Eleven years later, ‘they’ still hate us, now more than ever, Logan told the crowd. The Taliban and al-Qaida have not been vanquished, she added. They’re coming back.

‘I chose this subject because, one, I can’t stand, that there is a major lie being propagated . . .’ Logan declared in her native South African accent.

The lie is that America’s military might has tamed the Taliban.

‘There is this narrative coming out of Washington for the last two years,’ Logan said. It is driven in part by ‘Taliban apologists,’ who claim ‘they are just the poor moderate, gentler, kinder Taliban,’ she added sarcastically. ‘It’s such nonsense!’

Logan stepped way out of the ‘objective,’ journalistic role. The audience was riveted as she told of plowing through reams of documents, and interviewing John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan; Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and a Taliban commander trained by al-Qaida. The Taliban and al-Qaida are teaming up and recruiting new terrorists to do us deadly harm, she reports.

She made a passionate case that our government is downplaying the strength of our enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a rationale of getting us out of the longest war. We have been lulled into believing that the perils are in the past: ‘You’re not listening to what the people who are fighting you say about this fight. In your arrogance, you think you write the script.’

Our enemies are writing the story, she suggests, and there’s no happy ending for us.

What a consequential election the Americans are about to have with the right to free contraceptives and saving Big Bird from the private sector the major elements in the Democrat pitch.