Society & Culture - Posted by James Devitt-NYU on Monday, February 7, 2011 16:12 - 1 Comment 
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Engage Taliban to isolate al-Qaeda
The Taliban and al-Qaeda remain two distinct groups that can potentially be separated through political means, a new study finds. (Credit: iStockphoto)
NYU (US) — Engaging older-generation Taliban leaders before they become marginalized by escalating warfare, may be an effective way to separate them from al-Qaeda.
Share this article
Email
Republish this article
The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
“Many officials believe that the Taliban and al-Qaeda share the same ideology,” says Tom Gregg, head of the Center on International Cooperation at New York University.
“However, it is not an ideology they share; it is more a pragmatic political alliance. And therefore a political approach to the Taliban ultimately could deliver a more practical separation between the two groups.”
Among the study’s conclusions are:
- The Taliban and al-Qaeda remain two separate groups with different goals, ideologies, and sources of recruitment. There has been friction between these two groups before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and it remains today.
- Certain practices by the U.S. military, including night raids and attempts to fragment the Taliban, are helping to create new opportunities for al-Qaeda to reach its objectives to the detriment of U.S. core goals.
- Engagement of the Taliban in a political process has the potential to create conditions under which the Taliban would renounce al-Qaeda and agree to guarantees against the use of Afghanistan by terrorists, which the U.S. has defined as its core goal.
The older generation of Taliban, who presently still represent the movement, are potential partners for political negotiation, say the study’s authors, Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn.
But there is potential risk of the younger generation to gain momentum within the leadership—and the shift could represent a new stronger bond between the Taliban and al-Qaeda, that could pose an even stronger potential threat to the U.S. and the international community.
More news from NYU: http://www.nyu.edu/
Please wait
Then you would have to believe that “al-Qaeda”, a poorer than dirt third world country group of maybe a hundred or so people, somehow outwitted the most advanced military system in the world and infiltrated the most expensive and high tech country in the world, and even though hundreds of thousands of our troops have been stationed there for over 10 years, we can’t get a grip on a group of a hundred people…Our own CIA has admitted that al-Qaeda is just a small group of people that are taking the blame for the terrorist attacks. I f***ing hate this country for killing 5,000 of it’s own people knowingly and honestly. The Bush administration and everyone after it who condoned the cover up of the truth will burn eventually.