Word: talibanize
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...says he is, then the Afghan-born Denver airport-shuttle-bus driver represents a new kind of menace for the U.S. His arrest is a double blessing: it may have thwarted a terrorism plot, and it could give counterterrorism officials a goldmine of information on al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the state of the global jihad...
Afghans "have not been a major component of the transnational jihadi network," says Kamran Bokhari, director of Middle East analysis at the intelligence firm Stratfor. Afghan jihadis have tended to join the Taliban, which has traditionally limited its attentions to Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. But Robert Grenier, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan, believes the Taliban's worldview has changed a great deal since the government it ran was overthrown by the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. "The Afghan Taliban see themselves quite differently now from 9/11: many of the leaders now see themselves as part of the global...
...wouldn't be a surprise if the Taliban decided to mount a plot against targets in the U.S. "There are probably people [in the Taliban] who are saying, 'To get rid of the U.S., it's not enough to fight them here,' " says Lawrence Korb, a national-security expert at the Center for American Progress. After all, he points out, al-Qaeda's rationale for attacks on the U.S. was "to get us out of Saudi Arabia...
...sentiment restricted to the ranks of the Taliban. "Lots of Afghans see the U.S. presence as an occupation, and I can easily see how some of them would be motivated to strike at the U.S. wherever they can," Grenier says. Korb points out that there is a great deal of anger among Afghans over U.S. policies in their country. "There are people who feel we didn't keep our promises - President Bush talked of a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan," he says. "Some Afghans now wonder if we're not just like the Soviets...
...hard to know if the Taliban has been specifically recruiting Afghans for international operations. If the charges against him are true, Zazi may be no more than "an instrument of opportunity, someone who got in touch with them, who shared their ideology, and whom they thought they could use," says Bokhari. According to the Associated Press, a government document filed in connection with the case states that Zazi on Sept. 6 and 7, tried on multiple times to communicate with another person "seeking to correct mixtures of ingredients to make explosives." "Each communication," the AP quoted the document as saying...