"the global war against the Taliban"
Related: The Boston Globe's Invisible Ink: Taliban Are No Threat
I can't take the lying anymore, readers.
What makes you think this "report" is to be believed at all?
Smells like agenda-pushing psyops to cast doubt in the ranks of resistance, a typical intel tactic.
"Along rough border, a war within the war; Taliban members settle scores with tribes, family" by Griff Witte, Washington Post | April 20, 2010
Coming from them it is damn near confirmed propaganda.
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Yar Dad Khan sleeps with a Kalashnikov assault rifle in his bed, primed for the day his cousin returns.
His cousin is a local Taliban commander in northwestern Pakistan. Khan is a progovernment tribal leader. The two men do not get along.
In the rough borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the global war against the Taliban often boils down to a family feud, pitting tribe against tribe, son against father, brother against brother.
While the Taliban leadership professes devotion to a seventh-century interpretation of Islam, many insurgents have far more parochial interests. They want revenge for old grievances against their neighbors, or to settle a score with relatives.
The local passions enveloped in the broader conflict help to explain why the United States and its allies have struggled for more than eight years to end the insurgency, without success.
Yes, the lying, agenda-pushing, war-promoting newspaper is explaining things for us, dear readers!
Related: U.S. Paying Taliban For Protection
Yeah, that might not be helping out much, either.
The tribal and familial infighting is not new, but now it has the veneer of a civilizational clash, with more weapons, money, and recruits to keep the enmities fresh.
Yeah, I wonder who could be running weapons in there.
“There are so many factors that contribute to Talibanization,’’ said Saad Muhammad, a retired Pakistani general who directs a conflict-oriented think tank in this frontier city. “But by and large, it’s just a young person getting an idea and signing up.’’
************
“There are some good people in the Taliban, who actually want to bring an Islamic system to Pakistan. But very few,’’ said Khan, 35. “Most of them are bad people, like my cousin.’’
Before joining the Taliban, his relatives said, Raheel Khan was fond of Scotch and was hardly a model of Islamic piety. His trigger for becoming an insurgent was not a religious awakening, relatives and friends say, but his father’s decision to cut him out of the family inheritance.
That choice has had consequences: One family member has been killed, others have narrowly escaped death, and everyone in the family who has not joined the Taliban knows they have reason to fear.
The conversion of Raheel Khan was surprising because the family descends from a long line of maliks — Pashtun tribal leaders who traditionally call the shots in the poverty-stricken Federally Administered Tribal Areas, which line Pakistan’s northwestern border with Afghanistan.
The maliks own much of the land, get the best education, and, crucially, decide matters of war and peace on behalf of their fellow tribesmen. The government has long had only a token presence in the tribal areas; the maliks filled the void.
When the Taliban emerged as a force in the tribal areas in 2005 and 2006, members initially portrayed themselves as crusaders for Islamic justice. They patrolled the streets, punished criminals, and enforced edicts against perceived vices, such as dancing and playing music. In the conservative but relatively lawless tribal areas, many welcomed the group’s presence as benign, if occasionally brutal.
But the Taliban soon revealed its true ambitions with an assassination campaign directed against the maliks. The Taliban intended not just to enforce Islamic law, but to overturn the tribal order.
Maliks could spare themselves by vowing fealty to the Taliban but were otherwise marked men. Hundreds were shot to death or beheaded. Their personal nemeses — every malik has them — were all too willing to serve as executioners. Criminals, members of weaker clans, and family outcasts were especially enticed by the Taliban’s charms.
“All you had to do was grow a long beard, and you could settle all your scores or do any nasty thing you please,’’ said Muhammad.
The Taliban’s campaign appealed to Raheel Khan, friends and relatives say, because his father was a malik.
Unlike his cousins and siblings, Raheel Khan had dropped out of school early, by the seventh grade. He was a regular at parties and often drank heavily.
When he turned 25 in spring 2008, his father told him he would not receive any land.
Raheel Khan took his grievance to the tribal council, but his father used his influence to squelch the case. So Raheel Khan turned to an alternative justice system — the Taliban.
--more--"
So what about that alternative?
"The U.S. government was well aware of the Taliban's reactionary program, yet it chose to back their rise to power in the mid-1990s. The creation of the Taliban was "actively encouraged by the ISI and the CIA," according to Selig Harrison, an expert on U.S. relations with Asia. "The United States encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support the Taliban, certainly right up to their advance on Kabul," adds respected journalist Ahmed Rashid. When the Taliban took power, State Department spokesperson Glyn Davies said that he saw "nothing objectionable" in the Taliban's plans to impose strict Islamic law, and Senator Hank Brown, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Near East and South Asia, welcomed the new regime: "The good part of what has happened is that one of the factions at last seems capable of developing a new government in Afghanistan." "The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis. There will be Aramco [the consortium of oil companies that controlled Saudi oil], pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that," said another U.S. diplomat in 1997."
Oh, that's a real kick to the lower groans, isn't it, ladies?
The TALIBAN was established under U.S. AUSPICES?
We can "LIVE WITH THAT?"
Well, I SURE CAN as long as the KILLING STOPS -- especially since (sorry) I NO LONGER BELIEVE the LIES PROMOTED by my WAR-MONGERING, MUSLIM-HATING, AGENDA-PUSHING AmeriKan PRESS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Also see: Memory Hole: How I Came to Love the Veil
Had enough agenda-pushing lies from the war-promoting press yet?
