Taliban Threat Is Said to Grow in Afghan South

[DoYouEverWonder]

May 3, 2006

TIRIN KOT, Afghanistan, April 27 — Building on a winter campaign of suicide bombings and assassinations and the knowledge that American troops are leaving, the Taliban appear to be moving their insurgency into a new phase, flooding the rural areas of southern Afghanistan with weapons and men.

Each spring with the arrival of warmer weather, the fighting season here starts up, but the scale of the militants' presence and their sheer brazenness have alarmed Afghans and foreign officials far more than in previous years.

"The Taliban and Al Qaeda are everywhere," a shopkeeper, Haji Saifullah, told the commander of American forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, as the general strolled through the bazaar of this town to talk to people. "It is all right in the city, but if you go outside the city, they are everywhere, and the people have to support them. They have no choice."

The fact that American troops are pulling out of southern Afghanistan in the coming months, and handing matters over to NATO peacekeepers, who have repeatedly stated that they are not going to fight terrorists, has given a lift to the insurgents, and increased the fears of Afghans.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/world/asia/03afghan.html?hp&ex=1146628800&en=0692a5a972d58a3a&ei=5094&partner=homepage



Gee, I though BushCo got rid of the Taliban 3 years ago?

[Igel]

1. Kicked out of power, but it's rather hard to

dispose of something that entrenched in the mosques and the madaris.

The roots of the Taliban are in a form of Islam in the area, repressive and arch-conservative, married with the will to power in many species of conservative Islam, with more than a passing nod to incorporating bits and pieces of Pashtun cultural traditions. The Taliban finds little resonance outside of Pashtun areas--a comparison with an ethnic map of Afghanistan shows that even many of the places where isolated acts of Taliban "liberation" have occurred, usually reported as a result of the the Taliban's having "spread", are in fact in rather small Pashtun enclaves.

The form of Islam is Deobandi. It's not Wahhabi, but a home-grown Pakistani simulacrum of the Sa'udi national psychosis.