At an event last week at New York University, four men who know the Taliban better than most Westerners shared their perceptions of the group behind the insurgency fighting coalition forces in Afghanistan. What emerged was a portrait of shadowy figures, little understood by even those who have had close contact with the group. With “reintegration” now the “buzzword du jour” and calls for a negotiated settlement to the war gaining momentum, we have yet to understand just who it is we will be negotiating with. “We still understand very little about the Taliban,” said Alex Strick van Linschoten, echoing [...]
It would be hard, under any circumstances, not to see this as a pretty significant development: The leader of anal-Qaida-linked Chinese militant group has been killed in a U.S. drone attack inPakistan’s restive tribal region, an official said on Monday. AbdulHaq al-Turkistani, the leader of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Party, and twocomrades died when a missile fired from a CIA-operated pilotless aircraft strucka vehicle in North Waziristan district Feb. 15. . . . Al-Turkistani hails from Uighur in China’s eastern province ofXinjiang. But in the current context of strained U.S.-China relations, as well as the need for China’s UNSC vote [...]
The success of Operation Moshtarak, NATO’s military offensive to seize the Taliban-controlled town of Marjah in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, will be determined by how well coalition forces establish a functioning government now that the bulk of the actual fighting is over. Gen. Stanley McChrystal recently described the plan by saying, “We’ve got a government in a box, ready to roll in.” The concept of “government in a box,” or a functioning government ready for immediate deployment the moment combat operations end, is a novel one. Most of the attention lavished upon ISAF’s plans, however, has focused on the man chosen [...]
