Taliban

Prominent journalist Saleem Shahzad murdered after exposing ties between Pakistan’s navy and al Qaeda

by Paul Woodward 06.01.2011

Declan Walsh reports: A prominent Pakistani journalist who investigated links between the military and al-Qaida has been found dead, triggering angry accusations against the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency. Saleem Shahzad, Pakistan correspondent for a news service based in Hong Kong, disappeared on his way to a television interview in Islamabad on Sunday evening. On [...]

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NATO concern over Pakistan nuclear arsenal

by News Sources 05.24.2011

Al Jazeera reports: The head of NATO has admitted that the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons is a matter of concern, the day after the worst assault on a Pakistani military base in two years. Anders Fogh Rasmussen was speaking in Afghanistan on Tuesday, where he met Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, to discuss the [...]

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U.S. speeds up direct talks with Taliban

by News Sources 05.18.2011

The Washington Post reports: The administration has accelerated direct talks with the Taliban, initiated several months ago, that U.S. officials say they hope will enable President Obama to report progress toward a settlement of the Afghanistan war when he announces troop withdrawals in July. A senior Afghan official said a U.S. representative attended at least [...]

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News roundup — May 12

by News Sources 05.12.2011

Sunni monarchies close ranks Reports that the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is considering some form of membership for two non-Gulf states – Jordan and Morocco – confirm that the conservative Sunni monarchies of the Middle East are closing ranks against Iran, Shiite-led Iraq and the democratic wave sweeping the region. GCC secretary general Abdullatif al-Zayani [...]

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Time for Pakistan to divorce the US

by News Sources 05.12.2011

Shaukat Qadir, a retired brigadier and former president of the Islamabad Policy Research Institute, explains how Pakistan ended up at war with itself dealing with a tribal rebellion. If we hark back in time, in 2001, the Pakistani Pashtun and all Afghans were celebrating US intervention in Afghanistan. It would liberate them from Taliban oppression. [...]

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Taliban commander vows to avenge Bin Laden’s death

by News Sources 05.02.2011

The Guardian reports: A Taliban commander in Afghanistan has promised that his fighters would mount attacks to avenge the killing by US forces of Osama bin Laden. The commander, who gave his name as Qudos and operates in the northern province of Baghlan, said: “The killing of Osama bin Laden will bring no change to [...]

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Pakistan’s secret dirty war

by News Sources 03.30.2011

Declan Walsh reports: The bodies surface quietly, like corks bobbing up in the dark. They come in twos and threes, a few times a week, dumped on desolate mountains or empty city roads, bearing the scars of great cruelty. Arms and legs are snapped; faces are bruised and swollen. Flesh is sliced with knives or [...]

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Obama weighs talking to the Taliban, Hezbollah

by News Sources 03.18.2011

David Ignatius writes: In a rapidly changing Islamic world, the Obama administration is weighing how best to talk with adversaries such as the Taliban and, perhaps, Hezbollah. One model for the administration, as it thinks about engagement of enemies, is the British process of dialogue during the 1990s with Sinn Fein, the legal political wing [...]

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The myth of Talqaeda

by News Sources 01.10.2011

Alex Strick van Linschoten writes: The purported merger of the Taliban and al-Qaeda is the WMD of the Afghan war. This myth is almost as old as the two groups themselves. There’s so much writing on Afghanistan that it’s always going to be easy to find wild theories and dodgy “scholarship”, but this supposed morphing [...]

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Taliban not quite twelve feet tall

by Paul Woodward 01.07.2011

The theory behind President Obama’s Afghan surge (beyond the moronically simplistic “if it worked in Iraq, it should work in Afghanistan”) was the notion that after “sustained pressure,” “a more robust approach” — or whatever euphemism one chooses for an operation designed to kill more people — the US and Nato would be in a [...]

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‘Disappeared’ Pakistanis — innocent and guilty alike — have fallen into a legal black hole

by Paul Woodward 12.31.2010

Without a single reference to President Obama’s drone war in Pakistan, extrajudicial detention of prisoners at Guantanamo, the torture of suspected terrorists, CIA-run secret prisons, rendition, presidential authorization to assassinate US citizens, or the United States’ long history of supporting governments that use their power to suppress political dissent by making their opponents “disappear,” the [...]

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Embedded with the Taliban

by Paul Woodward 12.12.2010

For an American cable news organization to embed reporters with the Taliban would be a bold move. CNN isn’t bold. But on Saturday evening it took the moderately risky move of airing a Norwegian journalist’s film of life with Taliban fighters. “Some people might see this and think that you are trying to humanize this [...]

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How to talk to the Taliban

by News Sources 11.27.2010

The intrepid Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, in his most recent series of reports from Afghanistan, describes his meeting with Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, who spent three years from 2002 in Guantánamo and who, until July this year, was on the UN list of known terrorists. Zaeef is now a prolific writer and [...]

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Taliban say “end is near” as they anticipate US withdrawal from Afghanistan

by News Sources 10.27.2010

The Pentagon won’t admit it, but it becomes increasingly clear that the US and the Taliban are now — by differing means — pursuing the same objective: finding a way to get American troops out of Afghanistan. The Washington Post reports: Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has touted the success [...]

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Did the Taliban clock just start ticking?

by Paul Woodward 10.06.2010

“You have the watches, but we have the time,” the Taliban like to say. But now the Washington Post reports that the Taliban’s top commanders are “very serious” about finding a way to end the war. Their eagerness is driven by fear that their power will be usurped. The leadership knows “that they are going [...]

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Arming the insurgencies of the future

by Paul Woodward 09.16.2010

Guns are very durable — ownership tends to be transient. The New York Times examines a weapons cache which provides a snapshot of the arsenal that the Taliban in Marja — the part of Helmand Province that has seen the most sustained fighting of 2010 — have been using against US marines. In this collection, [...]

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Understanding the Taliban

by News Sources 09.03.2010

Jonathan Steele notes that during almost a decade of war with the Taliban, none of their top leaders have been interviewed which leaves many important questions unanswered. Have the Taliban changed in the decade since they lost office? Is there a neo-Taliban, as some suggest? What of the younger generation of field commanders who lead [...]

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Mosque opponents help the Taliban

by News Sources 08.30.2010

Newsweek reports: Taliban officials know it’s sacrilegious to hope a mosque will not be built, but that’s exactly what they’re wishing for: the success of the fiery campaign to block the proposed Islamic cultural center and prayer room near the site of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan. “By preventing this mosque from being built, [...]

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How Pakistan shut down Afghan-Taliban peace talks

by Paul Woodward 08.25.2010

In the New York Times, Dexter Filkins reports: When American and Pakistani agents captured Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s operational commander, in the chaotic port city of Karachi last January, both countries hailed the arrest as a breakthrough in their often difficult partnership in fighting terrorism. But the arrest of Mr. Baradar, the second-ranking Taliban [...]

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Taliban hunt Wikileaks outed Afghan informers

by News Sources 07.30.2010

Channel 4 News reports: The Taliban has issued a chilling warning to Afghans, alleged in secret US military files leaked on the internet to have worked as informers for the Nato-led coalition, telling Channel 4 News “US spies” will be hunted down and punished. Speaking by telephone from an undisclosed location, Zabihullah Mujahid told Channel [...]

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The terrorist delisting program

by Paul Woodward 07.12.2010

How to reduce the terrorist threat: use the label “terrorist” less often. A week ago Newsweek reported: Even as they denounce reports of covert talks from news sources such as the New York Times and Al-Jazeera, high-ranking insurgents have begun very cautiously admitting for the first time that peace negotiations are not totally out of [...]

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As Petraeus takes over in Afghanistan, could success be worse than failure?

by Paul Woodward 07.11.2010

While reflecting on the dangers of “success” in Afghanistan, Tom Engelhardt writes: On the basis of our stated war objective — “[W]e cannot allow Al Qaeda or other transnational extremists to once again establish sanctuaries from which they can launch attacks on our homeland or on our allies,” as General Petraeus put it in his [...]

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The grim, relentless task of crushing of the Taliban and al Qaeda

by Paul Woodward 07.01.2010

John Bolton writes: “America’s Afghanistan policy is in chaos. Fear of another Vietnam is palpable, and our friends and adversaries worldwide sense it.” Another Vietnam? If only the US might be so lucky! Vietnam was an exercise in nation building, interrupted by an American occupation, and then fairly swiftly brought to a peaceful conclusion after [...]

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Floundering in Afghanistan

by Paul Woodward 05.17.2010

Last fall, President Obama faced criticism in the early months of his presidency during his exhaustive strategic review of the war in Afghanistan. The review had become so drawn out that his detractors claimed it presented an image of indecisiveness. Obama’s defenders responded by saying this was a process of careful and thorough deliberation from [...]

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