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  • johnpi 7:38 pm on January 20, 2010 | 2 Permalink | Reply
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    Taliban overhaul their image in bid to win allies.

    …as the Taliban deepen their presence in more of Afghanistan, they are in greater need of popular support and are recasting themselves increasingly as a local liberation movement, independent of Al Qaeda, capitalizing on the mounting frustration of Afghans with their own government and the presence of foreign troops. The effect has been to make them a more potent insurgency, some NATO officials said.

    Afghan villagers and some NATO officials added that the code had begun to change the way some midlevel Taliban commanders and their followers behaved on the ground. A couple of the most brutal commanders have even been removed by Mullah Omar.

    I don’t know how significant a development this is in relation to the entire Afghan nation, since the Taliban aren’t going to be growing their presence outside of Pashtun areas any time soon, what with all the hurt feelings about scorched earth property destruction, massacres, taking the local women for concubines, etc. leftover from the 1990s civil war that was really a Pakistan-aided war of aggression against other ethnic and Muslim groups in the country…

     

  • johnpi 11:19 am on December 16, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
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    More comforting lies.

    On Monday, the Peshawar Press Club was the venue of a seminar entitled ‘Conspiracies of US and India against Pakistan’ at which the speakers advocated talks with the Taliban on the grounds that the fight in Afghanistan is a ‘nationalist struggle’ and the violence in Pakistan is the direct result of the American presence in the region.

    “Nationalist struggle”: It was a common misconception promoted by Musharraf that the Afghan Taliban were the same thing as the Afghan people. The half of the country that lives north of the Hindu Kush and are of different ethnic groups would beg to differ. Even among the Pashtuns, the extent to which the Taliban are in leadership is largely because they have killed off the tribal elders in those areas, or cowed them with ‘night letters’ and other threats.

     

  • johnpi 7:35 pm on November 17, 2009 | 2 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Brave Warriors Of Afghanistan, Najibullah, , , , , , , ,

    Last we checked in on the Swat Valley, women were reveling in the removal of Taliban restrictions while suspected Taliban supporters were being tortured and lynched by locals or receviing much the same from the military. As one embittered hotel owner in Swat said, “Even the Israelis have not done such bad things to the Palestinians as the Taliban did to us.”

    Now the leader of the Swat Taliban has reappeared in Afghanistan, and he’s promising vengeance.

    “I have reached Afghanistan safely,” Maulana Fazlullah told BBC Urdu.

    “We are soon going to launch full-fledged punitive raids against the army in Swat.”
    ….

    He issued a warning to the North West Frontier Province’s information minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain.

    “The authorities should beware, especially Mian Iftikhar Hussain, whose fate will be like that of Najibullah,” he warned, referring to Dr Najibullah who was Afghan president before the Taliban hanged him in 1996 when they took Kabul.

    Najibullah* was tortured, castrated and executed without trial by the Afghan Taliban in 1996, after which his body was dragged through the streets and hung from a lamp post.

    * Juan Cole today linked an article by a UN official who spent some time visiting with Najibullah just before the Taliban killed him. The official asked Najibullah if he regretted the blood on his hands from his time serving as head of the Afghan secret police under the communists.

    “Dear Alan, do not be naïve about what you are facing. They will bring a destruction you cannot imagine.”

    His message to me, at our New Year meeting in 1995, was one of no regrets for whatever he had done to stand against the Islamists. He was absolutely clear about that; he would do it again.

     

  • thabet 2:11 am on September 16, 2009 | 2 Permalink | Reply
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    I found this 2007 blog post which argues, quite forcefully and with good evidence, that the claims the Taliban, while brutal, brought peace and security to Afghanistan is unfounded and the result of lazy journalism, lack of knowledge, and Pakistani propaganda.

    In particular, the blogger (an academic specialising in Afghanistan) cites the mass killings of Hazaras (something conveniently forgotten by stupid idiots from Birmingham or London), and the way they treated the women of the ‘conquered’ rivals (also something conveniently forgotten by stupid idiots from Birmingham or London).

     

  • johnpi 6:55 pm on September 14, 2009 | 12 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Brave Warriors Of Afghanistan

    American actor Patrick Swayze has died.

    The AP obituary says his role in Dirty Dancing made his career, but the film that will last of his is “Red Dawn,” a farrago of right-wing fantasy/nightmare about a surprise invasion of the United States by the Soviet Union and the brownz (represented by the Cubans).

    A small group of teenagers form a resistance group called the “Wolverines.” Here’s a description of some of the action:

    Following a rise in popular support for the Wolverines, the Soviets decide to stop reprisals against civilians and begin hunting the Wolverines themselves. Spetsnaz commandos are sent into the mountains to eliminate the resistance, but the commandos are ambushed and killed by the Wolverines.

    The Wolverines are weakened, however, by the attacks and other events, and their morale erodes as the war of attrition takes its toll on their numbers. Even though the civilians are increasingly resistant to Soviet rule, the occupation forces are pushing the resistance to the breaking point. The remaining Wolverines are ambushed by three Mil Mi-24 helicopter gunships and Robert and Toni are killed, leaving the group reduced to four: Jed, Matt, Danny, and Erica. The survivors realize that they cannot outlast the Soviets, and if they keep fighting, they will all die.

    Determined to save at least some of their number, Jed and Matt stage a suicide attack on the Soviet regional headquarters to distract the troops while Danny and Erica escape to “Free American” territory.

    If you switch the Colorado Rockies for the Hindu Kush, the Soviet army for the US millitary, the Wolverines for the Taliban, the Spetsnaz commandos for the special forces, and “Free American” territory for Pakistan, you’ve got Afghanistan, right down to the suicide attacks.

     

  • johnpi 7:40 pm on August 16, 2009 | 1 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Brave Warriors Of Afghanistan, , ,

    Brave warriors of Afghanistan.

    So-called “night letters” or leaflets, left on the ground in villages in southern Afghanistan, threaten that the Taliban will cut off the noses and ears of those who vote on Thursday.

     

  • thabet 9:45 am on July 14, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
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    “Alternative narratives”:

    The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) has spoken out against the use of suicide bombings and other terrorist activities, which it says kills more civilians than any other military action.

    The reaction came after last Thursday’s bomb blast in Logar province which killed more than 20 people, including children on their way to school. UNAMA condemned the “barbaric” attack, the latest in a string of violence targeted at aid organizations.

    Perhaps supporting this sort of violence makes supporters of the Taliban on the streets of London, Birmingham, (or Lyon, or Brussels, or somewhere on the Gulf coast), feel a bit more manly?

     

  • johnpi 6:31 pm on May 12, 2009 | 19 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Brave American Warriors, Brave Warriors Of Afghanistan, , ,

    Who are the real psychopaths in Afghanistan?

    The bodies of dozens, perhaps well over a hundred, women, children and men, their corpses blown into bits of human flesh by iron fragmentation bombs dropped by U.S. warplanes in a village in the western province of Farah, illustrates the futility of the Afghan war. We are not delivering democracy or liberation or development. We are delivering massive, sophisticated forms of industrial slaughter. And because we have employed the blunt and horrible instrument of war in a land we know little about and are incapable of reading, we embody the barbarism we claim to be seeking to defeat.

    We are morally no different from the psychopaths within the Taliban, who Afghans remember we empowered, funded and armed during the 10-year war with the Soviet Union. Acid thrown into a girl’s face or beheadings? Death delivered from the air or fields of shiny cluster bombs? This is the language of war. It is what we speak. It is what those we fight speak.

    Wise criticism, though it fails to address the problem that a large-scale act of ‘industrial strength’ slaughter and indiscriminate violence (hirabah) was launched from Afghan territory (9/11) before the US arrived on the scene, and offers no recommendations on how to prevent that from happening again.

     

  • johnpi 11:15 am on May 12, 2009 | 4 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Brave Warriors Of Afghanistan, , , , ,

    Another poison gas attack – the third! – on a girls’ school in Afghanistan.

    WHen I first started writing this up I thought it was on update on the second attack from yesterday, but no. Ninety-eight people admitted to the hospital, including 84 teenage girls, this time in Muhmud Raqi:

    Students were gathering in the yard of Aftab Bachi school in Muhmud Raqi for a morning reading of the Quran when a strange odor filled the area. First one girl collapsed, then others, said the school’s principal, Mossena, who fought for breath as she described the event from her hospital bed.

    Will be adding the tags “hirabah” and “brave warriors of Afghanistan” to these posts.

     

  • johnpi 10:05 am on May 11, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Brave Warriors Of Afghanistan, , , , poison, ,

    There has been a second mass hospitalization at a Afghan girls school after 61 girls complained of sudden illness in Parwan province northwest of Kabul. There was a similar incident at another girls’ school last week, also in Parwan.

    A number of students interviewed at the hospital by The Associated Press complained of a strong sweet smell, which gave them headaches and made some girls wobbly before they passed out.

    “There was a very strong smell, like flowers in the hallway. I fell down and woke up in the hospital,” said the 18-year-old Zahera, who like many Afghan goes by one name. She lay in a ward full of girls, many of them two to a bed, wearing the typical Afghan school uniform of black robe and white headscarf.

    The possibility of a poison gas attack is being investigated. Several poison gasses apparently give off a sweet smell.

     

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