Originally posted by Zagros Those articles are still irrelevant to this thread since they do not allude to the Taliban being nurtured in Afghanistan or Pakistan. They merely provide examples of crimes commited in Afghanistan by criminals without any specific geopolitical agenda in commiting those crimes.

Sorry but one of them certainly did relate to the Taliban in Southern Afghanistan because the bolded portion of one of the the second article says that the price of weapons on the black market in Northern Afghanistan has been bumped up because the weapons are being bought by taliban in South Afghanistan. I believe this is relevent because it shows increasingly desparate attempts by Afghani Taliban to arm themselves to the teeth. If the paki ISI was truly the "mother hen of taliban terrorists" as Afghanan fanatically tries to promote with your full approval then they would not need to run to the north to buy weapons. Its obviously drug lords operating with their own cash and since similar weapons are much cheaper in Pakistan its plain obvious the ISI is not helping them.

Those articles are still irrelevant to this thread since they do not allude to the Taliban being nurtured in Afghanistan or Pakistan. They merely provide examples of crimes commited in Afghanistan by criminals without any specific geopolitical agenda in commiting those crimes.

Edited by Zagros - 28-Feb-2007 at 16:35

Post what you want but NOBODY disagrees that the Taliban exist in Afghanistan, it is a irrelevant discussions since everybody and their grandmother knows that Afghanistan is openly at war with them.

I made one for him.

What does that have to do with the Taliban existing in Pakistan?

edited---somewhat irrelevent to taliban.


Edited by maqsad - 28-Feb-2007 at 15:42

Our Pals in Pakistan

Charles Pe�a / antiwar.com

February 28, 2007

Making an unannounced stop in Pakistan on Monday, Vice President Cheney "expressed U.S. apprehensions of regrouping of al-Qaeda in the tribal areas and called for concerted efforts in countering the threat" according to an aide to Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf. According to Musharraf, Pakistan "has done the maximum in the fight against terrorism." Furthermore, Musharraf contends that there is no evidence that either Osama bin Laden or the Taliban's Mullah Omar are hiding out in Pakistan. But if bin Laden and company are not in Pakistan, where does Musharraf think they are? Did they flee Afghanistan to sip pi�a coladas on the beach in Fiji?

Pakistan is supposed to be an ally in the war on terrorism. The United States should not have to plead with an ally to go after public enemy number one. Nor should the United States have to put up with constant excuses for why the man responsible for ordering the Sept. 11 attacks against the World Trade Center and Pentagon remains at large.

To be sure, some of the bigger successes in the war on terrorism have come in Pakistan. The biggest success being the March 2003 capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. In each of these successes, the U.S. military or intelligence was involved in some way. But when left to their own devices, there has been a Keystone Kops-like aspect to Pakistani efforts. For example, in March 2004 the Pakistani military claimed they had surrounded several hundred al-Qaeda fighters, including a "high value target" thought to be Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's second in command. But when the dust settled from the pounding by helicopter gunships and artillery in southern Waziristan, Zawahiri was nowhere to be found. Despite Pakistani military claims to have sealed off a 20-square-mile area that no one could have escaped from, Zawahiri either slipped the noose or was never there to begin with.

Another farce also occurred in March 2004 when Pakistani intelligence claimed that al-Qaeda spy chief Abu Mohammed al Masri (AKA Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, one of the FBI's most wanted terrorists for his involvement in the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya) was killed. The next day, however, the Pakistanis admitted to a case of mistaken identity � the slain militant was only a small fry local operative and not an al-Qaeda big fish. To add insult to injury, not only did the Pakistanis come up empty-handed during their March 2004 terror sweep, but they also had 12 soldiers killed and 15 wounded when a convoy was ambushed.

Although capturing or killing bin Laden and other senior al-Qaeda leadership will not put an end to the terrorist threat facing America, they are nonetheless important targets � too important to be delegated to the Pakistanis if they are unable or unwilling to mount a serious effort to hunt them down. Gary Schroen � a former CIA officer who oversaw agency operations in the region until August 2001 � believes Musharraf is willing to hand over lesser al-Qaeda figures, but unwilling to go after any of the big fish because he fears a horrendous Islamic backlash if he is seen as capturing or killing a man viewed as Robin Hood by many Muslims around the world. According to Newsweek's Michael Hirsch:

"As evidence, Schroen says that it took the Pakistanis five months to act against [Abu Faraj] al-Libbi [thought by many analysts to be Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's successor] after the Americans delivered intelligence on the whereabouts of an al-Qaeda suspect who could not, at the time be specifically identified; Schroen believes the Pakistanis acted only after determining that the suspect was not bin Laden but a smaller fish. 'We gave them information on Libbi back in December [2004 � al-Libbi was captured in May 2005],' says Schroen�. 'They didn't want to do it.'"

Lack of seriousness on the part of the Pakistani government is further evidenced by all their deals to halt or curb military operations in southern Waziristan, the very area where bin Laden and al-Qaeda's senior leadership are thought to be in hiding. For example, in April 2004 the Pakistani military announced it had reached an agreement to halt military operations against tribesmen in return for a pledge not to harm Pakistan's interest. Yet, at the same time, the tribesmen announced they were ending their hunt for al-Qaeda militants. The most recent deal was struck with tribal leaders last September, in which they are supposed to take responsibility for curbing militant activities. As with past deals, critics believe that the Musharraf government has abdicated its responsibility and that the deal essentially cedes control of the area to militants, allowing them to step up recruitment and cross-border attacks into Afghanistan.

But if Pakistan is going to claim to be an ally in the war on terrorism � and be treated as such � such folly cannot be allowed to continue. If � for whatever reasons � the Pakistani government is not willing or able to go after al-Qaeda with a vengeance, then the U.S. government must be willing to take matters into its own hands. This does not mean a large-scale military incursion of Pakistan. Rather, it means that U.S. special forces must be allowed to act in discrete operations against al-Qaeda targets when there is reliable, actionable intelligence. Officially � for understandable reasons � the Musharraf government may not be able to sanction U.S. military operations in Pakistan. But unofficially, the Pakistani government needs to allow U.S. forces to conduct covert operations into Pakistan against al-Qaeda.

Admittedly, this is easier said than done. On the one hand, the United States does not want to take actions that would destabilize the Musharraf regime because a likely successor government could be radical Islamists who would inherit Pakistan's nuclear weapons. But at the same time, the United States cannot continue to embrace Musharraf as an unequivocal ally in the war on terrorism if his government is not willing to do more to find bin Laden and other important al-Qaeda figures hiding out in Pakistan.

Perhaps most importantly, the United States cannot afford to turn a blind eye (as it seemingly does to Saudi Arabia � has anyone noticed how the U.S. government doesn't complain about all the Saudi money being used to fund the Sunni insurgency in Iraq?) to the possibility that Pakistan may be enabling and facilitating al-Qaeda. Although it is important to consider the source, India has previously claimed that the Pakistani intelligence agency ISI is aiding al-Qaeda. Given the ISI's involvement aiding the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s and their previous support for bringing the Taliban to power in Afghanistan, such accusations cannot be blithely ignored.

Where the Taliban breeds

Analysis | The porous Afghan-Pakistani border has been lawless since being imposed on Pashtun tribes in 1893. But this wild frontier must be tamed if Afghanistan is to flourish.

Olivia Ward
The Toronto Star
February 18, 2007

When Hassan Abbas, then a Pakistani police chief, went on a raid in the country's lawless border region, he was surprised to find himself outside his territory � and inside Afghanistan.

"We weren't the only ones who were confused," says Abbas, now a fellow of the Belfer Center at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

"For hundreds of years, people have been living on both sides of the border, and when it was divided they found it inconceivable that they should suddenly be residents of another country."

The story illustrates how porous is the wild, mountainous frontier that separates the two countries along the 2,400-kilometre line, which is still in dispute more than a century after it was negotiated by British diplomat Sir Henry Mortimer Durand.

But for Canadian and other NATO troops � and the traumatized people of southern Afghanistan � the border is real and menacing as they anxiously await a predicted spring onslaught of Taliban fighters and suicide bombers from Pakistan.

The coming battles are said to be crucial for peace and stability in Afghanistan.

"Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership presence inside of Pakistan remain a very significant problem," said the outgoing American commander in Afghanistan, Lt.-Gen. Karl Eikenberry, urging a "steady, direct attack" on their operations bases in the border areas.

But those who are familiar with the turbulent border regions say the realities there are far more complex than Western policy-makers believe. And they warn that putting a stop to the "Talibanization" that is threatening both Afghanistan and Pakistan will not be accomplished by military means alone.

"The Pashtuns are the historically dominant group in the area, and they have been split by the Durand Line, so that there is a feeling their destiny has been interrupted," says Selig Harrison, director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy and author of five books on the border regions.

Moreover, he says, no foreign army has ever subdued the fierce border tribes.

The Durand Line, which divided Pashtun tribes between British India and Afghanistan in 1893, is viewed with resentment by people on both its sides and many of them of them consider it irrelevant.

"When you look at the partition today, it doesn't make a lot of sense," says geography professor Jack Shroder of University of Nebraska, Omaha, who has mapped the rugged areas.

"In the time of the British Raj, it was a ploy to divide and rule, and they put down white rocks to mark it. But people move the rocks around, because the border doesn't exist for them."

Like the border, law and order is a fluid concept in the tribal lands.

Pakistan has never managed to take control of the largely Pashtun area and created seven semi-autonomous units � Bajaur, Momand, Khyber, Orakzai, Kurram and North and South Waziristan � administered by federally appointed political agents.

Six smaller Frontier Regions provide a buffer between the agencies and the North West Frontier Province to the east. To the south is the large but sparsely populated province of Baluchistan, whose capital, Quetta, is said to be a Taliban command centre.

In the tribal regions, Pakistani courts and law enforcers have almost no sway, and the real power are the jirgas, or assemblies of elders, says Abbas, author of Pakistan's Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army and America's War on Terror.

The border regions have a population of some 38 million, including members of 60 Pashtun tribes and 400 sub-clans. With a literacy rate of little more than 10 per cent, few job opportunities beyond subsistence farming, deeply conservative religious views and an abundance of guns, the regions are a staging ground for militancy, drug trafficking and numerous smuggling rackets.

All these factors give the Taliban a head start in recruiting.

"The Taliban are sons of the soil, not foreigners," says Kamran Bokhari, a Toronto-based senior analyst for Strategic Forecasting Inc. "Over the past two decades, there has been a drift toward their kind of conservative Islam. An Islamist wave has hit the region, and there are many people who don't believe 9/11 happened and are convinced that there is a war going on against Muslims."

The tribal areas also have sheltered foreign and Afghan fighters fleeing previous wars in Afghanistan, and some of them have married local women and settled there.

Abbas says the Taliban was encouraged by "the Pakistani military's hidden alliance with religious political parties," in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks. When the United States urged Pakistan to attack the militants, the campaign was brutal but disastrous. In a territory where revenge is part of the traditional code, secular parties lost out and Islamists gained ground.

But pockets of secular Pashtuns who oppose extremism still remain, with little support from the government and constant threats from Islamist groups.

Some analysts point to these secularists as the hope for future peace on the borders. A leader of the nationalist Pashtun Awami National Party, Asfandyar Wali, recently defeated pro-Taliban politicians in an election in Bajaur Agency.

Nevertheless, Islamists in Bajaur have threatened local men against shaving their beards, and while some men have protested, Abbas says, the episode demonstrates the strength of extremism even in opposition areas.

But even among the Taliban, there are divisions and opportunities for negotiation, says veteran Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, author of several books on militancy in the borderlands.

"Negotiating with the present leadership (Mullah Omar, Mullah Dadullah and others) is not acceptable," says Rashid, adding that there are "moderate elements" who are willing to talk to the Afghan government and have met with the secular and nationalist Pashtun groups.

Rashid points out that the Pakistani government is deeply suspicious of those groups, fearing a new secession movement if they gain support. Pakistan rejected a recent peace plan put forward by Wali � and approved by Afghan President Hamid Karzai � to hold a jirga of tribal leaders from both sides of the border.

"Wali believes it's the last hope for the region," says Abbas. "But in Pakistan, it is difficult to challenge the military intelligence establishment."

Bokhari, who had a recent meeting with President Pervez Musharraf, says the Pakistani leader admitted he had "no magic wand" for solving the crisis on the borders but was open to political negotiation, as well as fencing and mining the frontier (the latter opposed by Canada). And Musharraf denied reports that the Pakistani intelligence service was supporting militants, saying that creating an unstable neighbour was against his country's interests.

But as the countdown to a predicted spring offensive continues, so will pressure on Musharraf to shut down Taliban bases in Pakistan's borderlands.

Says Harrison: "Since the economic viability of Pakistan depends on continued aid, a credible threat to cut it off would alarm the armed forces and other sectors of the Pakistani business and political establishment, forcing Musharraf to tack with the wind."

But most analysts agree that force alone will not be effective on the frontier. They say that tightly targeted attacks against the hard core of the Taliban, avoiding civilian casualties, should open the way for negotiations with those who are willing to lay down their arms.

"People who want to fight can be tackled militarily, and NATO must not allow (the militants) to believe they will just leave the area," says Abbas.

But Pakistan, he adds, is only part of the problem.

"It's crucial to support development of Afghanistan. A person with a job, and kids in school, will think twice before picking up a gun."

Originally posted by Sparten As for incursions that is all talk. NATO is a political entity. Not a militray one. They may talk about incursions, but any actual attempt to go into that terrain will lead to disaster for them. Not enough troops,