Who is responsible for the Taliban?

[TCO]

Here is an interesting article:

http://meria.idc.ac.il/journal/2002/issue1/jv6n1a1.html

[VetLegion]

I read that a long time ago. This is the interesting bit:

The beginning of the Taliban’s activity in Afghanistan is shrouded in myth. Ahmed Rashid recounted what he deemed the most credible: Neighbors of two girls kidnapped and raped by Kandahar warlords asked the Taliban’s help in freeing the teenagers. The Taliban attacked a military camp, freed the girls, and executed the commander. Later, another squad of Taliban freed a young boy over whom two warlords were fighting for the right to sodomize. A Robin Hood myth grew up around Mullah Umar resulting in victimized Afghans increasingly appealing to the Taliban for help against local oppressors.(48)

And of course the appropriate War Nerd column:

http://www.exile.ru/2006-September-22/war_nerd.html

Phew. I have just singlehandedly tripled the quality of this thread.

[TCO]

I think the Taliban are most resposible for the Taliban. I think Washington had/can have some impact...but expecting us to micromanage every faction, every emerging faction and know what will come up 10 years later is moronic. It comes from playing Civ with the AI instead of multiplayer.

[Proteus_MST]

Oops, wrong thread

[SlowwHand]

What?

[Proteus_MST]

Nothing, I just posted something here which should have belonged into the thread with the nuns sitting on my lap.

Bad habit to have several windows of Apolyton open at the same time. Sometimes you just use the wrong window for posting.

[Pekka]

There's tons of stuff around Taliban and evolution of it.. not just the US, in fact, lots of players out there. UK, Russia, Islamists, etc. Tons of folks.

[Zoid]

The Taliban is your fault, TCO. Didn´t you know that?

[TCO]

Come mister taliman and tali my banana

[KrazyHorse]

[Berzerker]

From what I've gathered, the Taliban were formed to fill the "vacuum" left when the Russians went home. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia wanted Afghanistan to be under rule by people more friendly to them than the Iranians, and local Pashtuns from the Pakistan-Afghan border became the Taliban. I dont know if they got our okay on that, but I imagine so given our interest in the region. We did give money to the Taliban to wage a war on the poppy and they had some success. For a while US oil interests were courting the Taliban for a pipeline thru the country but I think that fell thru partly because the Taliban were taking a beating in world opinion with their religious persecution.

We wont win in Afghanistan, for the same reason the Russians didn't win... We cant invade northern Pakistan to destroy their bases of operations, and according to Musharref we shouldn't because it would or could turn the Taliban into a tribal Pashtun movement since we would effectively be attacking their homeland. They got us logistically too... It just costs us a helluva lot more to get a soldier on the ground than them. The Pakis and Saudis aint exactly on our side in this, they'd probably be quite happy if the Taliban regained power.

The Repubs chastised Clinton for treating this problem as a "policing" matter when it should have been treated as war. It looks more like it was a policing matter, we didn't work with the Taliban before or after to get Al Qaeda even though they had expressed their willingness to help in exchange for our help on sanctions. We certainly got some AQ when we invaded Afghanistan, but since then most of the killing has been colateral damage. We wanted to drain the swamp and instead of using Afghanistan, we used Iraq for the drain. Makes sense, most of AQ seems to be Arabian Sunnis.