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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Taliban: We Didn’t Do It
by Sami Yousafzai, Ron Moreau Apr 17, 2013 4:40 PM EDT
The Afghan insurgents have been warning Al Qaeda against attacking the West, and now fear the Boston bombings will hurt their cause. Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau exclusively talk to the groups leaders.
As counterintuitive as it sounds, there was no celebrating among the Afghan Taliban leadership when they heard the news of the Boston Marathon terrorist bombings. On the contrary, senior Taliban officials say such attacks on the West are counterproductive and they fear that such actions can only hurt the Talibans efforts at shedding its image in the West that it is a terrorist organization that shelters Al Qaeda and condones Al Qaeda-inspired attacks. You wont find any link with Afghanistan to the Boston attack, a former senior cabinet minister in the Taliban tells The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview. The Taliban neither has the inclination nor the capacity for such an attack on the West.
The former minister, who declines to be named for security reasons, says he is afraid the Taliban will be tarred as terrorists once again even though the Afghan insurgency was not involved in the Boston bombings. Such attacks only feed anti-Muslim and anti-Islam arguments in the West, the former minister says, even though some Muslims may say its good that the U.S. is now feeling some of the pain that Muslims feel. This incident is clearly not going to help the Taliban or the Islamist movement worldwide, he adds.
The Afghan Taliban leadership, which is in contact with Al Qaeda on the ground in Pakistan, has been worried about an Al Qaeda-inspired attack on the West, presumably like the one in Boston, for weeks, says a senior Taliban intelligence officer who declines to be named. He says the insurgencys strategic planning committee told him a month ago that it feared a 9/11-type attack by Al Qaeda could ruin the insurgencys future strategy and further tarnish the Talibans image. We lost Afghanistan in 2001 because of 9/11 at a time when we almost controlled 100 percent of Afghanistan, the intelligence officer says. We dont want these incidents to upset our plans again.
The intelligence officer says the Taliban leadership explained to Al Qaeda about one month ago that the insurgency is trying to make political progress both inside and outside Afghanistan as well as improve its diplomatic relations with Muslim countries and the West before U.S.-led coalition troops withdraw in 2014. We told them this is a very important time for us and that any attack on the West would hurt the Talibans strategy and the Islamist cause, the intelligence officer says.
Full article:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/17/the-taliban-we-didn-t-do-it.html
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