Afghan Taliban in PR Scramble After Attacks

[EjazR]

Taliban in PR Scramble After Attacks - WSJ.com

KABUL—The Taliban leadership is scrambling to stem the public-relations fallout from recent suicide attacks that killed scores of Afghan civilians. The insurgent movement has launched an internal investigation, and some commanders now are blaming an autonomous radical faction for these "massacres" of civilians.

This dissension within the Taliban, described by multiple insurgent commanders and officials, illustrates a similar problem faced by the U.S.-led coalition: How to fight a war where winning over Afghan public opinion matters more than killing your foes.

Taliban commanders said the insurgent movement's unusual effort to distance itself from attacks for which it has publicly claimed credit is partially due to the TV broadcast of closed-circuit security-camera footage documenting a particularly gruesome killing spree.

The footage, aired this week on private Tolo TV, shows the Feb. 19 attack in which insurgent gunmen and suicide bombers killed at least 38 people in a bank in the eastern city of Jalalabad, one of the deadliest strikes ever perpetrated by the Taliban.

The footage, which has provoked widespread outrage here, shows a young man dressed in an Afghan police uniform casually shooting people at point-blank range with an AK-47 assault rifle. As the first victims crumple to the floor, others begin running for the exits while the gunman continues to carefully pick off some of the men.

A day after the Jalalabad attack, a Taliban suicide bomber detonated his explosives at a government office in northern Afghanistan where people had lined up to obtain identification papers, killing at least 30 people.

The U.S.-led coalition and its Afghan supporters have long maintained that brutality is the hallmark of the insurgency, citing statistics from the United Nations and human-rights groups that show the Taliban and its allies are responsible for the vast majority of civilian deaths.

Yet ordinary Afghans largely blame the coalition for civilian casualties, arguing that there wouldn't be a war and the deaths that come with it if the U.S.-led coalition hadn't invaded the country in 2001.

The Taliban commanders said Thursday that the insurgents' leadership is eager to maintain such public perceptions—which explains the sudden rush to decry the bloodshed caused by its own fighters.

"These attacks will turn the people against us," said a Taliban commander in eastern Afghanistan. "We will lose our influence among the people if we continue targeting civilian places."

The commander and others blamed the bloodiest of the recent attacks on the Haqqani network, a particularly violent insurgent faction led by Sirajuddin Haqqani. The Haqqanis, who operate autonomously of the Taliban's leadership even while recognizing the overall authority of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, are believed by U.S. and Afghan officials to have particularly strong ties to Pakistan's intelligence service.

The Haqqanis, who unlike the mainstream Taliban do not have a spokesman, couldn't be reached to comment.

The Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said his movement takes civilian casualties seriously. "An investigation is going on right now," he said in a telephone interview, offering an unusually direct acknowledgment of possible wrongdoing by the insurgents. "We have a code of conduct and everyone has to obey it. If someone violates the code he must be punished."

Mr. Mujahid was referring to a set of orders issued in 2009 by Mullah Omar, who instructed his fighters to avoid killing civilians. The Taliban code of conduct was issued after the coalition began tightening its own rules of engagement—limiting the use of air power, for example—in an effort to cut down on civilian deaths.

Although coalition commander U.S. Gen. David Petraeus has relaxed the rules since taking charge in June, the overall effect has been a drop in the number of civilians killed by coalition forces.

Yet civilians continue to be killed as coalition operations go awry. The latest high-casualty incident appears to have come over the weekend when Afghan officials say more than 60 people, many of them women and children, were killed when coalition helicopter gunships bombarded a remote northeastern district.

Coalition officials say they are investigating. But they say video footage from the helicopters shows 36 people were killed, all of them armed. Some coalition officials have even suggested publicly that people burned their own children in an effort to pin the blame on foreign troops. Waheed Omar, a spokesman for President Hamid Karzai, called the comments "racist."

Whenever civilian-casualty accusations are leveled against the Taliban, the insurgent movement usually defends its actions in public while privately meting out punishment to guilty commanders, said Kate Clark of the independent Afghan Analysts Network.

She cited the beheading by the Taliban of a busload of laborers bound for Iran in October 2008. At the time, the Taliban publicly insisted the dead were all police recruits, and thus legitimate targets.

"Often they will swear black is white; in that case they swore the laborers were in police, but then quietly disciplined the commander," who was relieved of his duties, said Ms. Clark, who maintains contacts with insurgents and is currently preparing a study on the Taliban's code of conduct.

Mr. Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, did try to shift some of the blame for recent attacks away from the Taliban in his comments Thursday. He suggested two of the strikes—a suicide bombing at Kabul's only Western-style shopping mall that killed two security guards and a suicide car bombing in the eastern city of Khost that left 11 people dead—were the fault of Afghan security forces, who intercepted the attackers, thus forcing them to detonate their explosives near civilians.

As for civilian deaths, he said: "Sometimes it happens."

 

[Ahmad]

How can we forget the Jalalabad attack in the Bank while one of the captured terrorists said on Tolo TV that he was really really enjoying everytime he shot dead people in the Bank.

 

[Ahmad]

He suggested two of the strikes—a suicide bombing at Kabul's only Western-style shopping mall that killed two security guards and a suicide car bombing in the eastern city of Khost that left 11 people dead—were the fault of Afghan security forces, who intercepted the attackers, thus forcing them to detonate their explosives near civilians.

Good excuse .

 

[Durrak]

They can't be human

 

[PlanetWarrior]

Then again, the false flag attacks which western and other intelligence agencies are known to routinely implement in order to discredit their enemies makes the claim of the Taliban that they have competition , more credible ?

 

[EjazR]

How the Taliban Lost Its Swagger - Print - Newsweek

At a dark, unheated village Madrassa near Peshawar, Pakistan, Mullah Yahya spends his days studying the Quran and begging God’s forgiveness for the horrors in which he once took part. Until a few months ago, he belonged to a Taliban unit operating in and around the Afghan town of Marja, led by a commander whose ruthlessness had earned him the nickname “Saddam.” But late last summer, Yahya finally quit the Taliban, together with a dozen other fighters and even Saddam himself. The commander and some of his men joined a U.S.-backed militia in the Marja area—where Saddam was killed by a Taliban IED just a few weeks ago. Yahya and others abandoned the war altogether. “I’d like to delete my past from my memory,” says the black-bearded 28-year-old, huddled in two coats against the madrassa’s indoor chill, to a visiting NEWSWEEK reporter. “I’m worried about how Allah will treat me for what I have done.”

Yahya and others like him are giving worries to Taliban leaders as well. More than 1,000 fighters have walked away from the insurgency over the past several months. The desertions alone may not drastically reduce the guerrillas’ armed strength of roughly 30,000, but they’ve compounded the group’s other recent losses. In the past year and a half, hundreds of seasoned commanders have been killed or captured, along with more than 1,000 fighters, and formerly secure bases across the strategic provinces of Kandahar and Helmand have fallen to the American-led offensive. “The numbers [of defectors] are small, but we can’t ignore them,” says a former Taliban cabinet minister who—like other insurgent sources interviewed for this story—declines to be identified for security reasons. “They are serious and are having an impact.”

The Taliban has lost its swagger. Eighteen months ago they were stronger than ever in eastern Afghanistan and their home provinces in the south, and they were growing fast in the formerly secure north and west. That was before mid-2009, when President Obama began deploying 50,000 additional U.S. troops. Even now, senior Taliban leaders in the safety of back bases inside Pakistan shrug off the defections. “We didn’t notice when they came; we didn’t notice when they left,” a member of the ruling Quetta Shura says of the deserters. “You watch—we’ll cause more American casualties this year than last.”

But fighters on the front lines are far less cocky. They freely admit that defections, desertions, and battlefield losses are undermining their military effectiveness. Worse, the defectors have given valuable intelligence to the Americans. “They gave names of anyone who was supporting the Taliban,” the former minister says. “They are one reason for our heavy casualties.” Morale has been hit hard, too, he adds: “One of our biggest sources of pride and confidence was that there had been no real defections before.” When Obama first announced plans to begin drawing down U.S. forces in Afghanistan this coming summer, the Taliban hailed it as a signal of surrender. They sound a lot more tentative now, even when speaking of the U.S. plan to turn over all security duties to Afghan government forces within four years. “As we get closer to 2014, we feel nervous and under pressure,” says a Taliban intelligence officer from Helmand.

One of their biggest concerns is the lack of real leadership at the top. “In the 16 years of the Taliban’s military and political life, this is our most difficult phase,” says Zabihullah, a senior Taliban adviser. The movement’s founder, Mullah Mohammed Omar, has been unseen and silent since he fled Afghanistan in late 2001, and his right-hand man, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, has been held for the past year by Pakistani security forces. The two senior commanders who nominally run the war in the south now—Abdul Qayum Zakir and Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor—inspire little confidence in the ranks. “There has never been such an emptiness of leadership,” says the former minister, and Zabihullah agrees. “Those top two are not leading the movement well. They do not seem mentally prepared for such a heavy task.” Field commanders seem to be on their own, each pursuing his own agenda, and the ex-minister sees little or no coordination among the ruling Quetta and Peshawar Shuras and the Haqqani network that controls eastern Afghanistan. “Everyone seems to be marching to his own drum and under his own flag,” the former minister says.

The result has been a breakdown of authority on the ground. As mid and lower-level commanders are taken down, many of their replacements seem incapable of keeping their fighters in line, longtime Taliban sources complain. Kidnappings, indiscriminate IED and suicide-bomb attacks, abuses of power, and outright banditry are alienating formerly sympathetic villagers. “Day by day we are losing discipline,” the former minister says, “and with that, crucial popular support.” The soaring number of collateral deaths is a particular grievance: in the first 10 months of 2010 alone, U.N. statistics say the insurgents were responsible for 1,800 civilian deaths—three times the number caused by U.S. and NATO forces.

Yahya detested what the insurgency was becoming. He first joined the Taliban in the name of driving the infidel Americans out of his homeland, he says, but the movement has degenerated into something cruel and un-Islamic. He’s haunted by thoughts of the villagers who were beaten and tortured by his group for visiting government offices, and of villagers who fed and housed the militants and whose homes were then bombed by the Americans after the Taliban had left. “We were playing with the lives of people,” Yahya says. “We killed and harmed innocents, just as the infidel Americans do.” He thinks also of comrades in arms whose lives were squandered in hopeless attacks. “The commanders didn’t care,” he recalls. “We didn’t even collect the dead bodies.”

Some Taliban leaders privately admit they hate losing idealistic fighters like Yahya—men they call the “book Taliban” for their commitment to Islamic studies. Newer recruits tend to be driven by money, power, or the lack of any better employment, insurgents say. “I’m worried that Taliban who are fighting for Islam are decreasing, and those who have dirty intentions to kidnap and make money are increasing,” the former minister says. “Too many fighters are fighting for their own interests,” says a Taliban subcommander in Helmand.

But that doesn’t stop the insurgents, who are planning a major offensive against the Americans when serious fighting resumes in the spring. “We will attack in larger numbers, with new recruits from Waziristan and with more madrassa students,” the former minister promises. Yahya has no doubt that recruits will be found. “The Taliban are bad,” he says, “but the people are angry with the Americans for killing and arresting innocents, and the Afghan Army and police steal the people’s opium and money.” He pulls his two coats around him against the winter air. “Not even 2 percent of the Taliban think like me.” His pessimism is echoed by a former Taliban commander who quit the insurgency after two years in U.S. and Afghan prisons. He too has retreated to a madrassa in Pakistan. “I’m sick of fighting,” he says. “But I still believe the Americans will be defeated.” As long as that idea persists, the war is not over.

 

[CardSharp]

Poor Afghans can't catch a break. Caught between NATO and the Taliban.

 

[no_name]

Don't think they ever had a break to start with, what with their history and tribal conflicts.

 

[CENTCOM]

Desperate times call for desperate measures as it’s been the case with the Taliban! Failing propagandas and losing territory has long pushed them over the brink of desperation. Are they really hopeful of injecting any sympathy and support in people’s heart, when they continue to commit and claim responsibility for these inhumane acts of terror? Their cover is wearing thin and people are well aware the Taliban have long been preying on innocent lives while trying to achieve their evil agenda. Does not propaganda spread by the Taliban and their mouthpiece attempt to brainwash us into ignoring the realities of their cruel actions? Should we permit any conspiracy theory from taking shape now that their crimes have been captured on video? Below is the video of the massacre that killed nearly 40 civilians at a bank in Jalalabad. After watching such an atrocity, can there be any doubt?

The US went to Afghanistan to eliminate the terror network responsible for 9/11, and to help bring peace and stability to all Afghans. Dear forum readers, the Taliban inflicted untold damage upon the nation of Afghanistan under their dark regime. The Taliban regime not only kept Afghans brutally repressed, but, with great force and purpose, they kept progress and prosperity at bay. Thousands were massacred, women were forced from the country's schools and jobs, and many were left to beg on the streets for food. Did not the Taliban rule by fear? The rebuilding of Afghanistan is a global commitment, and NATOs International Security Assistance Force coalition in Afghanistan continues to grow; now numbering 49 contributing nations. The people of Afghanistan have begun experiencing the kind of freedom simply unimaginable during Taliban rule, and that can be credited to the efforts of Afghan, US and NATO forces. Afghanistan today is also witnessing an unprecedented reformation. In 2006, only 36 schools were operating in the Uruzgan Province and now 250 schools have opened with more than 1,100 teachers and 425 trainees.

U.S. Central Command | Progress in Afghanistan Highlighted by Business Growth, Job Creation and New Infrastructure Projects

More females are attending schools, job growth, new factories and a rising economy is leading the nation towards prosperity. Afghanistan, once a country with one of the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the world has just received a new women’s health clinic in Paktika.

http://www.rferl.org/content/Afghan...uce_High_Maternal_Mortality_Rate/2188006.html

The truth remains; As the US and Coalition Forces have made progress in Afghanistan and people in the region have begun to experience life in a free society the Taliban are losing their grasp. The hard work of U S and NATO forces continues to lead Afghanistan towards democracy and prosperity. As the Taliban continue to create hurdles in the way of coalition forces; the reality clearly suggests they are standing on the last leg and staring at defeat.

CDR Bill Speaks,

DET, United States Central Command

U.S. Central Command

 

[Thoma Yosip]

Then again, the false flag attacks which western and other intelligence agencies are known to routinely implement in order to discredit their enemies makes the claim of the Taliban that they have competition , more credible ?

Since the Taliban claim credit for the attacks, your premise is without merit.