Taliban

Taliban advances on diplomatic front

by News Sources 03.06.2013

Daily Beast reports: Nearly one year after announcing it was “suspending all dialogue” with the U.S. over its “ever-changing position,” the Taliban seem keen to enter into preliminary peace talks once again. The Taliban’s sudden desire to reopen talks with the U.S., and perhaps even with the government of President Hamid Karzai, whom the insurgency [...]

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Taliban are fighting a political war while the U.S. is still fighting a tactical military war

by News Sources 09.20.2012

Rajiv Chandrasekaran reports: As U.S. and NATO forces have evicted insurgents from a broad swath of southern Afghanistan, senior Taliban commanders have shifted toward a new battlefield strategy, one less focused on reclaiming lost territory and more on winning the next phase of the 11-year-old war. U.S. military and intelligence officials believe that Taliban commanders, [...]

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Why it’s time for talks with the Taliban

by News Sources 09.10.2012

Matt Waldman writes: We should welcome the news that the Taliban are reportedly open to the idea of negotiating a general ceasefire and even a peace settlement. The peace process in Afghanistan is at risk from spoilers on all sides and fraught with challenges. But we owe it to the Afghan people, and to all [...]

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Afghanistan’s peace hopes may rest on Taliban captive

by News Sources 08.21.2012

Reuters reports: In the cloistered circles of the Taliban high command, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar had no equal. As military chief of the hardline Islamic movement that once ruled Afghanistan and was ousted by a U.S.-led alliance, he oversaw the campaign of ambushes and roadside bombings that proved his fighters could threaten the most advanced [...]

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Taliban commander: we cannot win war and al-Qaida is a ‘plague’

by News Sources 07.11.2012

Julian Borger reports: One of the Taliban’s most senior commanders has admitted the insurgents cannot win the war in Afghanistan and that capturing Kabul is “a very distant prospect”, obliging them to seek a settlement with other political forces in the country. In a startlingly frank interview in Thursday’s New Statesman, the commander – described [...]

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Taliban praise India for resisting Afghan entanglement

by News Sources 06.20.2012

Reuters reports: India has done well to resist U.S. calls for greater involvement in Afghanistan, the Taliban said in a rare direct comment about one of the strongest opponents of the hardline Islamist group that was ousted from power in 2001. The Taliban also said they won’t let Afghanistan be used as a base against [...]

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The great Taliban jailbreak

by News Sources 06.04.2012

Luke Mogelson writes: When the stranger unbolted the cell door and whispered for them to hurry, Rahim assumed that somewhere in the prison a fight must have broken out. It was the middle of the night, and normally the heavy metal door remained locked until the morning call to prayer. For the past five months, [...]

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Video: U.S. considers prisoner tranfers for Taliban peace deal

by News Sources 02.04.2012
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Video: Is Pakistan backing the Taliban?

by News Sources 02.03.2012
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Taliban make formal declaration of victory

by News Sources 01.16.2012

The New York Times reports: Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban’s one-eyed leader, seems to have taken a page from George W. Bush’s playbook. Just as the former president declared “mission accomplished” in Iraq years before the war there ended, the Taliban made their own victory declaration this weekend, even though roughly 130,000 coalition troops were [...]

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Dial 1 to speak to the Taliban

by News Sources 01.05.2012

The Economist‘s Asia blog considers the prospects for peace in Afghanistan now that the Taliban has an official address — a political office in Qatar. Peace with the Taliban has three main actors and a large unsupporting cast. The opening of a Taliban office in Qatar suggests a change of direction from one of the [...]

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Taliban leaders held at Guantánamo Bay to be released in peace talks deal

by News Sources 01.03.2012

The Guardian reports: The US has agreed in principle to release high-ranking Taliban officials from Guantánamo Bay in return for the Afghan insurgents’ agreement to open a political office for peace negotiations in Qatar, the Guardian has learned. According to sources familiar with the talks in the US and in Afghanistan, the handful of Taliban [...]

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Pakistani death squads go after informants to U.S. drone program

by News Sources 12.31.2011

The Los Angeles Times reports: The death squad shows up in uniform: black masks and tunics with the name of the group, Khorasan Mujahedin, scrawled across the back in Urdu. Pulling up in caravans of Toyota Corolla hatchbacks, dozens of them seal off mud-hut villages near the Afghan border, and then scour markets and homes [...]

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Obama administration considers censoring Twitter

by Paul Woodward 12.20.2011

How dangerous can 140 characters be? Apparently if those 140 characters are being fired onto the web through the Twitter account of al Shabib, Somalia’s militant jihadist movement, then the national security of the United States could be in jeopardy. The New York Times reports: American officials say they may have the legal authority to [...]

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Secret U.S., Taliban talks reach turning point

by News Sources 12.18.2011

Reuters reports: After 10 months of secret dialogue with Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents, senior U.S. officials say the talks have reached a critical juncture and they will soon know whether a breakthrough is possible, leading to peace talks whose ultimate goal is to end the Afghan war. As part of the accelerating, high-stakes diplomacy, Reuters has [...]

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Why Afghans have come to hate Americans

by Paul Woodward 12.04.2011

U.S. and Afghan government officials are struggling to reach a strategic long-term agreement — the sticking point is Afghan opposition to night raids which have surged under the Obama administration and now happen as often as 40 times a night. NATO officials say they have modified how night raids are conducted in response to the [...]

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U.S. Afghan strategy in disarray

by News Sources 12.04.2011
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Pakistan to boycott meeting on Afghanistan after NATO strike kills troops

by News Sources 12.01.2011

Bloomberg reports: Pakistan stepped up its protests over a NATO airstrike that killed 24 of its soldiers, deciding to boycott an international conference on Afghanistan to be held in Germany next week. The decision to pull out from the Dec. 5 summit in Bonn was agreed at a meeting of the federal Cabinet yesterday, according [...]

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Night raids and death squads in Afghanistan

by News Sources 11.29.2011

What’s the difference between the death squads being operated by the Haqqani network and the night raids by US Special Operations forces? Chances are that the Haqqanis know the names of a much higher percentage of their victims. That isn’t the only difference, but it’s significant. As far as the U.S. and its allies are [...]

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Taliban target mobile phone masts to prevent tipoffs from Afghan civilians

by News Sources 11.11.2011

The Guardian reports: Afghanistan’s communications infrastructure has become the latest casualty of the intensified war between Nato and the Taliban, with mobile phone companies reporting crippling attacks on their network of transmission masts. The onslaught came in the wake of a decree by Hamid Karzai ordering phone companies to defy insurgent demands to shut down [...]

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U.S. turned a blind eye to torture in Afghan prisons

by News Sources 10.31.2011

The Washington Post reports: Across the street from U.S. military headquarters in Kabul, shrouded from view by concrete walls, the Afghan intelligence agency runs a detention facility for up to 40 terrorism suspects that is known as Department 124. So much torture took place inside, one detainee told the United Nations, that it has earned [...]

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Attacks on Americans in Kabul get Haqqani network’s message across

by News Sources 10.31.2011

Rod Nordland reports: Every bomb, they say, has a return address. When car bombs blew up in West Beirut, or explosions cut down worshipers in Sadr City mosques, survivors generally knew who was to blame, and more or less why — even when no one claimed responsibility. So, too, with the suicide car bomb that [...]

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German general says NATO Afghan mission has ‘failed’

by News Sources 10.09.2011

Der Spiegel reports: It was 10 years ago that the United States, together with its NATO allies, marched into Afghanistan to put an end to Taliban rule and begin the hunt for al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden. A decade later, the terrorist leader is dead. But, says Harald Kujat, former general inspector of the German [...]

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9/11: the tapping point

by News Sources 10.07.2011

David Rose writes: One morning in June 2001, three months before the 9/11 attacks on the United States, I happened to be interviewing a senior official from the British Secret Intelligence Service, M.I.6. His current focus was the war on drugs, not international terrorism, but he shared a piece of information that united the two [...]

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