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| India-Pakistan |
| 'Taliban advance only made possible by Al Qaeda's help' |
| 2008-06-23 |
| The Taliban advance in Afghanistan could not have taken place without support from Al Qaeda, according to Pakistani journalist and author Ahmed Rashid. He told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in an interview on Sunday that Al Qaeda has established a route to Iraq for the Taliban and “there is a lot of traffic” on it. He said Al Qaeda is also raking in vast amounts of money from the drugs trade, some of which it is siphoning off to the Taliban. The sophistication with which the Taiban carried out the recent jailbreak seems to have been carried out with the help of Al Qaeda. “Al Qaeda seems to be very much an organisational coup for the Taliban,” he added. Rashid, asked about Osama Bin Laden’s capture, replied that President Bush would like to see him captured before the United States presidential elections but “we have no indication on the ground that anything dramatic is about to happen”. He said the US has stepped up its attacks, including attacks by drones, on the Pakistani side of the border and if intelligence indicates that there is a gathering of Taliban or Al Qaeda, the US acts very, very fast and does not always seem to have asked the Pakistanis for permission. Asked if the new government in Islamabad was really going to move against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, he replied, “The problem is that the military has been engaging the Taliban in peace deals for quite some years and they have not been able to get very much out of it. I think what the civilian government wants to do is to have a more comprehensive plan - political reform in the Tribal Areas, where the Taliban and Al Qaeda are based, and economic development. But such plans have to be backed by a strong military position and the problem now is that the military is in a very static position. The military is not on the offensive, it is not showing a picture of strength to the extremists and this is going to stymie the whole effort by the civilian government.” Asked if the new government is going to take steps to go after the terrorists, Rashid answered that it would do so, provided the army and the new government were “speaking from the same page”, which he believes they are not. What is needed is a mixture of social and economic development, plus military power, which only the army can provide, he argues. Asked whether there are elements in the Pakistani military sympathetic to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Rashid replied: “I think there is enormous sympathy for the Taliban within the military establishment and there is no doubt that the Taliban do have sanctuaries in Pakistan where they are not affected by any kind of military action.” He said 30-40 percent of the fighters coming into southern Afghanistan are coming from the Pakistani side of the border. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #5 I am serious, Paul. It was a good question, one of the many (ok, almost all) to which I do not know the answer, but which caused me to stop and think. And I really do think you have the potential to become one of Rantburg's regional experts; look how quickly you responded to usable criticism of the approach you'd taken up 'til yesterday. Go deep into Rantburg's archives and read what Dan Darling used to post, back when he was still a university undergraduate student. He learnt so much that as soon as he had that bit of parchment with BA on it he was swept into the world of terrorism consulting, far beyond the ken of us open source amateurs. There used to be another Paul, too, who was an expert on Pakistan; I think 'twas he that started posting nuggets from the Urdu press. He dropped away when he got too busy at school, I believe. The nice thing about the internet is that worldly rank is of less consequence than knowledge and understanding. There is no barrier to you achieving that here, irrespective of your chosen field in the analog world. (And for all I know you're an adorably excitable professor of nuclear physics at Cambridge, or a frustrated city grammar school teacher, or a London Bobby. But you know what I am, and yet you value my opinion of you -- life's a funny old thing, eh?) |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2008-06-23 18:07 |
| #4 That was below the belt trailing wife What have i done to upset you? |
| Posted by: Paul 2008-06-23 12:38 |
| #3 the US has stepped up its attacks, including attacks by drones, on the Pakistani side of the border and if intelligence indicates that there is a gathering of Taliban or Al Qaeda, the US acts very, very fast and does not always seem to have asked the Pakistanis for permission. Very good. McZoid, I love your background pieces -- I always learn something new, and see old bits of information in a new perspective. Thank you! Paul, good question. I look forward to the day when you post well-informed answers. :-) |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2008-06-23 10:11 |
| #2 “I think there is enormous sympathy for the Taliban within the military establishment and there is no doubt that the Taliban do have sanctuaries in Pakistan where they are not affected by any kind of military action.” I wonder what influence Hamid Gul still has over the ISI/Army? |
| Posted by: Paul 2008-06-23 09:57 |
| #1 He is most certainly an expert on al-Qaeda, and he ain't lying about his government contacts. Do the math. Al-Qaeda was founded in 1989, by a Paleoarab, Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden. Azzam was murdered in the same year. When the Soviets pulled out, Arab jihadis settled around Kandahar. They protected Pakistan based Afghans, who sought to build a Pashto state based on the Pushtarun Code, which was a harsh localized sharia. When various Afghan governments proved weak, Taliban created a mass movement that built from its power base until it assumed control of most of the country. It was when it was somewhat consolidated, that they expanded the Al-Qaeda genocide camps, and invited foreign terrorists to train. Pre 9-11 American Muslim websites posted open bragging by trainees. Although Taliban took UN and US aid money ($43 million in 2001 alone), they never acknowledged same. During their rule they publicized burnings of opium poppy fields in the north, while they allowed a Pashto monopoly in the trade. Taliban took, and is still taking, a 15% cut of said trade, and they now deal Heroin. Karzai allowed the first Heroin factories to go up in Afghanistan. Most of these are visible from Pakistan, which allows provincial exploitation of that trade (there are 2,000,000 heroin addicts in Pakistan). With Obama having a 15% lead in the presidential polls (of course, it is a bump) it is likely that NATO would effectively hand deliver Afghanistan to the same animals who carried out 9-11. Taliban and al-Qaeda were and are an integral unit. Of course, Karzai told Der Spiegel that he admired their morality. Real moral people; they wouldn't allow single women to work, and shot them when they resorted to begging. |
| Posted by: McZoid 2008-06-23 00:36 |