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Originally Posted by Danzig
you're right, which is why i don't understand their move to placate the taliban, and let them have what they wanted in the swat valley region.
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the "taliban" is a name we attach to a broad range of fundamentalist islamic fighter's in pakistan and afghanistan. many of which have conflicts with other groups we also identify as "taliban".
what the pakistani's are doing is actually (and finally) sort of subtle and smart. they're trying to split off the "taliban" in the swat from the other "taliban" in the northwest territory's.
this is after 15,000 pakistani troops managed to alienate most of the populace in the swat by random shelling of village's to combat about 3,000 "taliban".
we used to imagine a monolithic "communist" conspiracy and so fumbled any chance to exploit the obvious fracture's between russia and china.
we can repeat that error or actually learn from a prior mistake.
there is no "taliban" in the same sense there's a "pakistan". they're decentralized and exploiting that is what we want the pakistani's to do.
versus random shelling. which is what really stupid people would do.