“Decoding the New Taliban”-Awaiting Dick Cheney’s Retraction

[kpete]

November 12, 2009
“Decoding the New Taliban”
Posted by Steve Coll

Awaiting Dick Cheney’s Retraction
By Spencer Ackerman 11/12/09 2:04 PM

This looks incredible. Steve Coll introduces us to a collection of scholarly essays called ‘Decoding The New Taliban’.

Antonio Giustozzi, a fellow at the London School of Economics, is the editor of a new volume of research essays about the Taliban entitled “Decoding the New Taliban,” which is being published here by Columbia University Press. It is an outstanding and important collection—just the sort of locally specific, openly debatable, scholarly analysis about the diverse structures and leaders of the Taliban that will be required more and more if the international community is ever to understand the insurgents and divine how to prevent a second Taliban revolution.

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Coll:
In an essay entitled “Reading the Taliban,” Joanna Nathan of the International Crisis Group updates some of her work on Taliban propaganda and communications strategies. Her analysis of the repetitious themes in Taliban magazines and DVDs—the recapitulation of Guantánamo imprisonment stories as folk culture narrative; the amplification of Pashtun grievances around ethnic revenge killings and notoriously corrupt figures such as the Uzbek commander General Dostum—is particularly chilling.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/stevecoll/2009/11/decoding-the-new-taliban.html
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/stevecoll/2009/11/decoding-the-new-taliban.html#ixzz0WfrQnEUA

Hmm, so, uh, Guantanamo Bay, eh? Perhaps former Vice President Dick Cheney will want to retract this:
http://washingtonindependent.com/44018/the-text-of-dick-cheneys-speech-at-aei

DICK: Another term out there that slipped into the discussion is the notion that American interrogation practices were a “recruitment tool” for the enemy. On this theory, by the tough questioning of killers, we have supposedly fallen short of our own values. This recruitment-tool theory has become something of a mantra lately, including from the President himself. And after a familiar fashion, it excuses the violent and blames America for the evil that others do. It’s another version of that same old refrain from the Left, “We brought it on ourselves.”