Pakistani Taliban threaten Suicide Bombings;
Mark LeVine is disturbed by the tendency of Barack Obama and other US politicians to lump the Taliban together with al-Qaeda. The latter, he says is an international terrorist organization. The Taliban in contrast is a "territorially rooted" "ethno-nationalist" movement.
Aljazeera International on Mawlana Fazlullah, the number 2 man in the Tehrik-i Taliban or Pakistani Taliban.
The Tehrik set off a bomb Monday at Kohat in an apparent attempt to free prisoners from a convoy.
The Taliban also kidnapped 30 police officers and army troops in the rugged Swat Valley. 
A planned Pakistani army operation against the Tehrik has been called off while the Parliament in Islamabad debates policy toward the restive northwest.
Pakistani PM Yousef Raza Gilani is exploring using tribal chieftains against the militants.
Baitullah Mahsud of the Tehrik-i Taliban has threatened the secular nationalist government of the Awami National Party, which represents Pathans or Pushtuns who reject religious radicalism. The ANP won the provincial elections in the North-West Frontier Province that abuts the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
In Afghanistan, fighting between Afghan army troops supported by NATO close air support killed 40 Pushtun guerrillas in Ghazni province.
Barnett Rubin on globalization and corrupt states.
posted by Juan Cole @ 7/29/2008 03:21:00 PM
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4 Comments:
Quite nice, Professor to see Informed Comment re-deploying us all from L'Idée Fixe IRAQ to Afghanistan, et al :)
From Gore Vidal:
Fifty years ago, Harry Truman replaced the old republic with a national-security state whose sole purpose is to wage perpetual wars, hot, cold, and tepid. Exact date of replacement? February 27, 1947. Place: White House Cabinet Room. Cast: Truman, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, a handful of congressional leaders. Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg told Truman that he could have his militarized economy only if he first "scared the hell out of the American people" that the Russians were coming. Truman obliged. The perpetual war began. Representative government of, by, and for the people is now a faded memory.
Only corporate America enjoys representation by the Congresses and presidents that it pays for in an arrangement where no one is entirely accountable because those who have bought the government also own the media....Although we regularly stigmatize other societies as rogue states, we ourselves have become the largest rogue state of all. We honor no treaties. We spurn international courts. We strike unilaterally wherever we choose. We give orders to the United Nations but do not pay our dues. We complain of terrorism, yet our empire is now the greatest terrorist of all. We bomb, invade, subvert other states. Although We the People of the United States are the sole source of legitimate authority in this land, we are no longer represented in Congress Assembled......We the unrepresented People of the United States are as much victims of this militarized government as the Panamanians, Iraqis, or Somalians. We have allowed our institutions to be taken over in the name of a globalized American empire that is totally alien in concept to anything our founders had in mind. I suspect that it is far too late in the day for us to restore the republic that we lost a half-century ago.
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If I were a Pakistani, I suspect I might be fairly ticked off at the US right now. On one hand, the US helps a dictator, Mussaraf, maintain his death grip on power in Pakistan, in the name of democracy, of all things!! On the other hand, the US violates Pakistan's sovereignty by attacking across its border.
Maps are helpful. The one I posted last week helps us understand that the folks occupying the administrative regions on both sides of the border as your maps show are the same people--Pushtun--and in their history, there is NO border what-so-ever between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The Taliban, despite the efforts of many to say otherwise, are primarily Pushtun, which is why there're Taliban on both sides of the non-existent border. And anyone who has read Ahmed Rashid's book about the Taliban knows they are NOT al-Qaeda. All conflating them does is to complicate an already very delicate situation, whose only solution is political.
Obama's rhetoric about walls in Berlin seems to be no more than goat poodu given the policy direction he's articulated about Venezuela, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
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