Word: pashtuns
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...While he does hold sway over a large mass of the former Taliban command structure, which has largely taken refuge in Pakistan's lawless mountain sanctuaries, the bulk of what is currently known as the Taliban in Afghanistan is made up of disaffected and alienated bands of Pashtun tribesmen who have been leveraged out of their traditional power bases and are disillusioned by the increasingly corrupt and ineffective government in Kabul. The only point that these groups - some of which are made up of opportunistic criminals, narcotics kingpins and smugglers - can agree on is that they are against the Afghan...
...This approach would also be much more palatable to Afghans from the largely non-Pashtun north, who bitterly fought Taliban rule during the civil war and are more likely to launch another war than submit to a Taliban-led government. The Taliban today operate in virtually every Afghan province, and in several places they have been able to create a parallel system of government, but they do not have the support of a majority of Afghans. Most still vividly remember the deprivations of Taliban rule, and if given a choice, they would prefer their current situation to that of eight...
...governor of Oruzgan's Chora district, Khan was a former provincial police chief who had acted as Karzai's protector when the Pashtun leader returned from exile in 2001 to rally tribes against the Taliban. His death "has made the tribes angry," says his elder son, Dawood. "They want to stand against the Australians...
...restrained by political and diplomatic concerns from pursuing enemy targets inside Pakistan, while the loyalties of Pakistan's security forces are clearly divided. Those forces - especially the Frontier Corps that guards the border - can be crudely characterized as being pro-Taliban (the Afghan Islamist movement is based in the Pashtun ethnic group found on both sides of the border) but hostile to al-Qaeda, which is composed of foreigners. But both organizations are found in Pakistan's lawless Federally Administered Tribal Areas, where Osama bin Laden and his key lieutenants are also believed to be holed...
...made a halfhearted attempt, at Washington's behest, to stop the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda from waging insurgency across the border. But that only inflamed tensions; the Afghan militants turned their rage on his government, winning to their cause local Pakistanis with whom they have close ties. (The Pashtun ethnic group straddles the border...