(War Nerd)
The Taliban Strikes Back
After six years of ignoring Afghanistan, things have gotten bad enough to force American officials to pay attention.
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What’s scary now, for the ISAF’s chances of holding on to the country, is that the Taliban seems to have learned its lesson.
It never had a reputation for sophistication, and its hillbilly Pashtun ways weren’t exactly calculated to win hearts and minds.
The Pashtun have always been a little strange.
They have probably the most anti-women attitude of any tribe on earth. Here are a couple of Pushtun proverbs that give you the general idea:
“Women belong either in the house or in the grave,” and
“Even one’s own mother and sister are disgusting.”
They don’t even claim to find women attractive; for the typical Pashtun warrior, the sexiest thing around is a little boy.
(Tony informed us of that 5-6 yrs ago)
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There are a lot of very familiar patterns in this story. If you zoom out from Wanat and look at the bigger situation in southern Afghanistan, you’ve got the classic ingredients for a long, bloody guerrilla war: a big ethnic group on both sides of an artificial border, difficult terrain, and dirt-poor peasants with a long tradition of fighting just about everyone who comes along, from Alexander the Great to the 19th century British.
The Pakistani/Afghan border is 1,500 miles long, and the people living on both sides of it are Pashtun, the biggest ethnic group in Afghanistan and the support base of the Taliban.
The Taliban started as a Pashtun resistance to the Northern Alliance warlords, mostly Uzbeks and Tajiks, who took power after the Soviet pullout in 1989, and the Taliban is still mostly Pashtun.
The reason you don’t hear so much about the ethnic angle is simple: Neither side wants to push that angle in its propaganda.
The Taliban would like to claim to be defending Islam, and the Americans are happy to go along with that, so they can say we’re fighting Islamic terror.
But the fact is that the Taliban stands for old-school Pashtun tradition more than for Islam.
And the Taliban is divided even further, with complicated loyalties to local warlords and tribal chiefs.
