Well, it is a joke, just not an intentional one.
Via Daily Beast:
If nothing else, Joe Biden got the attention of the Afghan insurgents. “Look,” the U.S. vice president tells Newsweek’s Leslie H. Gelb in the magazine’s latest issue, “the Taliban per se is not our enemy”. That’s critical. There is not a single statement that the president has ever made in any of our policy assertions that the Taliban is our enemy because it threatens U.S. interests.” Active and former members of the group’s senior leadership have one question: why didn’t the White House say so sooner?
Even now, after a decade of fighting the Americans, the group’s leaders tend to say they have nothing against the United States as a country — although they remain as committed as ever to resisting the U.S. occupation of their homeland. “We are not natural enemies of each other,” says Khazi Habibullah Fauzi, who served as the Taliban’s charge d’affaires in Saudi Arabia before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. “We became enemies because of an external factor — namely Osama bin Laden, who was not an Afghan. Now he is gone, and the Taliban have little or nothing to do with Al Qaeda.” […]
But not surprisingly the Taliban are also deeply embittered by Biden’s statement. “Biden is talking both sense and nonsense — if we are not your enemies, then what are you doing in Afghanistan?” the operative complains. “Is this some kind of joke, to say we are not your enemy after you occupy our country, imprison us in cages and kill tens of thousands of our people? We didn’t invite you here, and we never wanted to become your enemy.”
Taliban fighters in the field take an even tougher stance. “When I first heard the statement I laughed,” says a 30ish Taliban subcommander from southern Afghanistan. “I wondered if this was an American joke.” He and others are far from ready to forgive and forget. “You are only saying we are not enemies now because we have put up such a strong and unbeatable resistance,” the subcommander says. “Before 9/11, I didn’t hate America, But after ten years of war, after the bombings and atrocities, I now think the U.S. is enemy No. 1. And I’m proud to say that.”