Over at the Reuter’s Pakistan blog, some disdain is thrown at the report of a rift between Al Qaeda and the Taliban, but also an acknowledgement of the frequency of infighting among the various groups. Finally, a scorecard of the various groups operating in the “Af-Pak” region.
Such reports of rifts are impossible to verify and may be deliberately designed to confuse – the talk of a break between Mullah Omar and al Qaeda comes as the United States has talked of stepping up pressure on the ”Quetta shura”, named after the capital of Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, where Washington says the Afghan Taliban are based. Islamabad says Mullah Omar is not in Pakistan.
But history would suggest that the Islamist militants do not always form a cohesive whole or even follow a common ideology. After the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the mujahideen who had driven them out became fragmented, leading to a bloody civil war. In Kashmir too, where a separatist revolt began in 1989, different militant groups rivalled and sometimes fought each other.
