Here is yet more of the State Department’s abject idiocy and ethnocentrism. It has no idea that the Taliban operate on a value system entirely different from that of the secular West. Ned Price and his ilk likely can’t even conceive of that as a possibility. And why do they think that the Taliban will pay attention to anything they say, anyway? Does Ned really think that the Taliban will hear his words and suddenly decide to pack their government with women, men who think they’re women, and other people that they’d ordinarily just throw off the top of a tall building?

The age of absurdity in which we live is truly impossible to parody. I’d like to present Ned Price to you as a fictional embodiment of how silly and full of nonsense our State Department is. But he is all too real.