From the category archives:

Taliban

Karzai’s troublesome independence

April 5, 2010

After Benjamin Netanyahu was recently insulted by President Obama during his March visit to Washington (Obama declined to offer him dinner), Israeli commentators struggled to make an appropriate comparison and for some reason thought this was treatment that the head of a small African state might expect — the rather transparent implication being that Netanyahu [...]

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US funds help arm the Taliban

April 4, 2010

The New York Times reports:
Since their offensive here in February, the Marines have flooded Marja with hundreds of thousands of dollars a week. The tactic aims to win over wary residents by paying them compensation for property damage or putting to work men who would otherwise look to the Taliban for support.
The approach helped turn [...]

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The opium wars in Afghanistan

March 30, 2010

At TomDispatch, Alfred W. McCoy writes:
To understand the Afghan War, one basic point must be grasped: in poor nations with weak state services, agriculture is the foundation for all politics, binding villagers to the government or warlords or rebels. The ultimate aim of counterinsurgency strategy is always to establish the state’s authority. When the economy [...]

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Insurgent faction presents Afghan peace plan

March 24, 2010

The New York Times reports:
Representatives of a major insurgent faction have presented a formal 15-point peace plan to the Afghan government, the first concrete proposal to end hostilities since President Hamid Karzai said he would make reconciliation a priority after his re-election last year.
The delegation represents fighters loyal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, 60, one of the [...]

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Afghan tribal rivalries bedevil a U.S. plan

March 12, 2010

The New York Times reports:
Six weeks ago, elders of the Shinwari tribe, which dominates a large area in southeastern Afghanistan, pledged that they would set aside internal differences to focus on fighting the Taliban.
This week, that commitment seemed less important as two Shinwari subtribes took up arms to fight each other over an ancient land [...]

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U.S., Afghan officials hope insurgent feud signals split

March 9, 2010

McClatchy reports:
Simmering divisions between rival Islamist groups erupted into open warfare in northern Afghanistan this weekend as Taliban forces battled fighters from one of their main allies, Afghan officials said Sunday.
With their leader pursuing tentative peace talks with the Afghan government, more than 100 Hezb-i-Islami militants fighting the Taliban put down their weapons and surrendered [...]

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Former Pakistani officer embodies a policy puzzle for the US

March 5, 2010

Carlotta Gall spoke to a US-trained former colonel in Pakistan’s spy agency, who spent 20 years running insurgents in and out of Afghanistan:
If Colonel Imam personifies the double edge of Pakistan’s policy toward the Taliban, he also embodies the deep connection Pakistan has to the Afghan insurgents, and possibly the key to controlling them.
Once a [...]

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Pakistani reports capture of a Taliban leader

February 23, 2010

The New York Times reports:
In another blow to the Taliban senior leadership, Pakistani authorities have captured Mullah Abdul Kabir, a member of the group’s inner circle and a leading military commander against American forces in eastern Afghanistan, according to a Pakistani intelligence official.
American officials in the region and in Washington said they had received some [...]

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Fixing what’s wrong in Washington… in Afghanistan

February 22, 2010

Tom Engelhardt, noting that the US government is broke and that there is a bipartisan consensus that Washington is paralyzed, asks:
Why does the military of a country convinced it’s becoming ungovernable think itself so capable of making another ungovernable country governable? What’s the military’s skill set here? What lore, what body of political [...]

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Was the arrest of the Taliban’s second-in-command a strategic blunder?

February 17, 2010

Updated below
The capture of the Taliban’s second in command, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, has been hailed as a huge blow to the Taliban but it may turn out to deliver an even bigger blow to President Obama’s hopes for an early withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.
Hajji Agha Lalai, former head of the Afghan government-led [...]

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Deal with the Taliban pragmatists — not the elusive ‘moderates’

February 5, 2010

Michael Semple, a fellow at the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, says that an attempt to cut a deal with the Taliban should not be conceived as an effort to peel away moderates:
The people with whom any deal would have to be done, those Taliban prepared to contemplate accommodation, have [...]

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‘It’s better to join the Taliban; they pay more money.’

February 3, 2010

When President Obama announced his 30,000-strong troop surge in December he said: “these additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.”
It was another example of what has become all too [...]

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Why the Taliban won’t be bought off

January 31, 2010

Sun Tzu wrote:
It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in [...]

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