The Taliban are scholars and students of sharia (Islam’s ancient law and societal framework). They know much more about the subject than Obama. And while it is obvious that many people long for things other than freedom, it is even more obvious that the Taliban know what is in what passes for their own hearts, and those of other fundamentalist Muslims, better than Bush ever could.

As it happens, the Taliban abominate the Western ideal of freedom. It contradicts their basic conceit that the good life calls for perfect submission to sharia — the opposite of freedom.

No matter how much they’ve told us who they are over the years, we see the Taliban of our hopeful imagination rather than the Taliban who, through remorseless word and deed, have always proved exactly who they are.

Oh, we’ve condemned the Taliban’s “extremism” — though it is verboten to say just what it is they are so extreme about. The cruel hudud penalties that they so enthusiastically execute have been undeniably established in sharia law for a millennium . . . which is why the Taliban are far from alone in enforcing and justifying them.

Thus, the ludicrous foundation of American policy on Afghanistan for a generation has been that the Taliban are not what they are — jihadist enemies of the United States who are committed to a sharia-supremacist worldview, which holds that establishing sharia law and mores everywhere is the highest duty.

The Taliban hewed to an interpretation of Islam that Obama refused to acknowledge as authentic, its support by 14 centuries of revered Muslim scholarship notwithstanding. The Taliban denied that there is a relentless human urge for freedom, maintaining, to the contrary, that the rejection of sharia is intolerably sinful. They were unabashed on these points.