On 2/20/2010 2:17 PM, Bob W wrote:
On a point of accuracy, it was probably al Qaeda that assassinated
him, not the Taliban.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/ahmed-shah-massoud-729417
.html
This is some sort of drama-doc about it. I can't find any
footage but
I remember seeing some at the time. Subsequent events
overshadowed his
assassination though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eG_8kPn_cs
At the time the Taliban and A Qaeda were joined at the hip,
and it was a distinction without a difference. That's still
more or less true.
It's never been true, and it's quite important to make the distinction. We,
the west, are going to have to come to terms with the Taliban at some point.
The Taliban have been around for a long time - long before al Qaeda and
their strand of fundamentalism. They are mentioned in despatches sent from
Afghanistan by the British during Victorian times.
It's unlikely that we'll come to terms with al Qaeda, which will probably
wither away or mutate into something else, rather the way Palestinian
terrorism of the 70s did.
Bob
Al Quada's leadership and the Taliban's leadership are joined by ties of
blood and marrage. In tribal societies that's more important than
ideology, or for that matter ethnicity, but their Ideologies are more
than compatible. I doubt the West could ever come to terms with the
Taliban, except in the minds of the deluded, or those who are willing to
condemn large swaths of their fellow humans to misery so they themselves
can be personally comfortable. It is in it's present form a creature of
the Pakistani secret service that got out of control. History is full
of these little gems. Few know that Hindenburg and Ludindorf, (who were
De-facto the leaders of Germany for the last two years of WWI), were
responsible in part for the Russian Revolution, their shadow
administration sent Lenin to Moscow in a sealed train to help knock
Russia out of WWI. It was a ploy that had interesting results. Thirty
years later Hitler fough Stalin, I won't comment on the morality of
either regime, just to point out that if it weren't for Hitlers
predecessors there would probably have been no Stalin to fight. The
Taliban is the child of Pakistani Military Intelligence and now the
Pakistani Army has to fight them in Pakistan.
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