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India-Pakistan |
Large number of Taliban living in Quetta |
2006-08-30 |
![]() The newspaper report said Pakistani officials admit the presence in their country of some Afghan Taliban, but “testily deny” that Pakistan has become a Taliban base. Such allegations, they suggest, cannot be corroborated for the same reason that Pakistan has not been cracking down more: There is no simple way to identify who is and who is not a Taliban fighter. “(Taliban fighters) may be coming. I’m not disputing that,” according to Chaudhry Muhammad Yaqoob, inspector general of police. “The border is porous. People keep moving in and out,” he said. But he denied that any Pakistanis were going to Afghanistan to fight. He and other local police stressed that they cannot arrest everyone in Quetta who wears a turban, which is traditionally associated with the Taliban. There are 400,000 Afghans living in the area and almost all the men wear the traditional headdress, along with many Pakistanis. The report recalled that when the police arrested 29 wounded Afghan men from Al-Khair, a private hospital in Quetta, it claimed that 10 of them had been fighting NATO forces in Afghanistan, and hailed the arrests as a symbol of their crackdown on Taliban fighters. But hospital officials at Al-Khair said they had no reason to believe the men were fighters. “We haven’t seen anything that will give us the sense that these are Taliban. They are simple Afghans. All have long beards and turbans,” one person said. Paul Fruh, ICRC head in Quetta, added that innocent civilians are wounded in southern Afghanistan every day - and that many of the men are afraid to seek medical help because they are often falsely accused of being Taliban. |
Posted by:Fred |
#2 Nothing that some armed long-flight-duration IR equipped drones can't cure. |
Posted by: Zenster 2006-08-30 21:57 |
#1 Balochis and Pashtos and Waziris and Sindhis, have little use for the majority Punjabis. Sindhis gravitate toward less stringent Islam and liberal politics, while Balochis and Pashtos play both the Taliban and Iran cards. As for the "deadly attacks" made from cross-border safe harbors: Taliban isn't doing much killing. In fact, they are doing much more dying. |
Posted by: Snease Shaiting3550 2006-08-30 09:56 |