Inside the Taliban
"The mujahideen have now acquired such strength that neither Pakistan nor NATO can fight against us. The Taliban are standing on both sides of the border. More operations breed more Taliban, and this time the Taliban will rule the whole region."
Not so sure about that as yet, but the superlative Syed Saleem Shahzad of Asia Times Online offers a unique insight into the Taliban - or what he calls the 'neo-Taliban' - their weapons, tactics and unhinged mentality and ideology.
Cynicism aside, there certainly appears to be a lot of confidence among them. They are more than willing to die in large numbers since many more will certainly follow; whereas in the West, every setback and casualty brings howls of despair. While there have been significant casualties among NATO, to suggest that we have been dying like flies is not true. It's more accurate that Western publics don't have the stomach for the campaign that the Taliban do, and that is our enemy's most significant advantage.
Another card up their sleeve is their lack of a single command and control structure, which renders them less vulnerable to attacks on their leadership. The only unifying factor is their ideology:
I launched a series of questions. "It is still not clear who is in whose command. What is the command of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar [leader of the Hezb-i-Islami]? Is [veteran Afghan resistance figure] Jalaluddin Haqqani under [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar, or is he commanding separately? Who do the Pakistan Taliban answer to? To Mullah Omar? And what are Pakistani jihadis up to?
Sadiq smiled at the barrage of questions and responded with some breaking news, "Mullah Omar, the Taliban shura [council], al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban have resolved this issue once and for all. Soon the mujahideen will announce the revival of a [region-wide] Islamic emirate, and after this - like all fighting groups gathered under a single command in Iraq - all commanders in Afghanistan will fall under the umbrella of the Islamic emirate."
With the current state of emergency only distracting the Pakistani army from the fight, you can be sure that the Taliban are readying themselves to extend the conflict. Perhaps a little implausible, but not totally out of the realms of fantasy, is this reminder of how quickly the tables could turn in asymmetric war:
"The Americans know exactly how near we are to Islamabad and they are aware of defections in the Pakistani army, and they are also aware that only one or two defections at the level of colonel will mean that the mujahideen will get their hands on some batteries of missiles which can carry nuclear warheads.
"And they [Americans] know the moment the mujahideen get that, the game will turn in favor of the mujahideen both in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and then nobody will be able to stop our march. So the Americans want a big battle between the army and the mujahideen so that the end game will be that they can step in and destroy Pakistan's nukes under the pretext that the Pakistani army cannot protect them from the mujahideen," Sadiq said.
Chilling stuff.
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