What's the difference between Al-Qaeda and the Taliban?

[Rogue]

I'd never heard of either before 9/11 and I have thought (assumed maybe) they were the same group of people with the same goals.

Meet The Press had a quote about how originally we went to Afghanistan to rout one or the other of these groups quickly and now we're caught in a long ongoing effort against the other instead.

I thought we went to Afghanistan to find and kill Osama and bring wrath upon those who helped him.

I know there's no way to make this simple, but I'm trying to get my head around it. If I can, then maybe I'll tackle understanding the notion of how we flip-flop sides between Iran/Iraq once a decade or so.

[Frozen Sooner]

Rogue-

The Taliban was/is a political faction in Afghanistan that advocates strict adherence to sharia law with some additional extra-quaranic junk that's even more harsh towards women than Mohammed advocated. They were the dominant political party until the US invaded. Their senior membership included several veterans of the mujahaddeen resistance to Soviet occupation.

Al-Qaeda is an international cell-based terrorist organization headed by Osama Bin Laden. Many members of al-Qaeda, includind Bin Laden, are also former mujahaddeen, which might explain part of your confusion.

The Taliban was and is very sympathetic to al-Qaeda's stated goals, in particular the expulsion of all non-Muslims from the Arabian peninsula, and as such provided both funding and safe haven for al-Qaeda.

Make sense?

[Rogue]

Thanks, Froz. That helps.
So, a person could be a member of both, but the Taliban is specific to Afghanistan?

My brain still gets all pretzelled up when I try to sort out who we support/supported when. During the Cold War, we helped the mujahadeen and Saddam Hussein fight against their oppressive neighbors the USSR and Iran.

[Okla-homey]

I would add to FS excellent explanation, we were opposed to the Taliban in Afghanistan because of their insistance on giving aid and comfort to Osama and his Al-Q comrades and their dogged reluctance turn him over to us in the face of our ultimatum requiring same following 9/11.

This was not simply because they were ideological fellow travelers with Osama, which they generally were, but also due in no small measure to a deep-rooted cultural norm in that part of the world that requires hosts to protect their guests.

[Frozen Sooner]

This was not simply because they were ideological fellow travelers with Osama, which they generally were, but also due in no small measure to a deep-rooted cultural norm in that part of the world that requires hosts to protect their guests.

That's really interesting and makes a lot of sense. Thanks-IIRC, you were over there both pre- and post- 9/11, right

[Frozen Sooner]

Thanks, Froz. That helps.
So, a person could be a member of both, but the Taliban is specific to Afghanistan?

My brain still gets all pretzelled up when I try to sort out who we support/supported when. During the Cold War, we helped the mujahadeen and Saddam Hussein fight against their oppressive neighbors the USSR and Iran.

Realpolitik is murky sometimes. Sometimes you're forced to help out someone you find repugnant in order to keep someone even more repugnant from taking over.

For example, the US decided to stay out of China's revolution because the revolutionaries kind of had a point-Chang Kai-Shek and the current Chinese government were pretty terrible. So we let Mao take over. Oops.

[Okla-homey]

That's really interesting and makes a lot of sense. Thanks-IIRC, you were over there both pre- and post- 9/11, right

Post 9/11. I went in in January '02, about three months after 9/11.

[StoopTroup]

One I won't throw dirt on and the other...well there's nothing left to throw dirt on?

[Rogue]

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=what%27s+the+difference+between+al+qaeda+and+tal iban&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=what%27s+the+difference+between+al+qaeda+and+ta liban&fp=n26KBHEJnEw

[Rogue]

Who needs the whole innerweb when we have Froz and Homey?

http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1054493.html


There are important distinctions between the Taliban regime that ruled Afghanistan until late 2001 and the Al-Qaeda network that carried out the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. RFE/RL spoke with two experts who explain why those differences remain significant nearly three years after the collapse of the Taliban regime.
Prague, 25 August 2004 (RFE/RL) -- As one of America's preeminent scholars on Afghanistan, Barnett Rubin understands the differences between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda very well.

But Rubin -- the director of the Center on International Cooperation at New York University -- says many others do not.

"Since 9-11 there has been an unfortunate confusion between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in the minds of people who were previously unfamiliar with this region -- to the point where a U.S. member of Congress once expressed great surprise when I said the Taliban were not the people who [attacked] the World Trade Center," Rubin says.

In fact, it was Al-Qaeda that planned and carried out the 11 September attacks in the United States. The terrorist network had its roots in Afghanistan fighting against the Soviet occupation of the 1980s. But it is composed mostly of Arabs or Islamic militants from countries other than Afghanistan.
"Al-Qaeda...is a kind of globalized anti-imperialist movement with Islam as its ideology."


"[Al-Qaeda] has a global agenda which goes beyond any particular country and is aimed at a kind of globalized Islamic jihad -- a very new kind of jihad -- against the United States as a superpower. It's a kind of globalized anti-imperialist movement with Islam as its ideology," Rubin says.

By comparison, much of the Taliban leadership comprised ethnic Pashtun Afghans who grew up in refugee camps or religious boarding schools in Pakistan -- called madrassas -- during the Soviet occupation of their homeland. Rubin says their outlook has always been more provincial.

"The Taliban, of course, are an indigenous Afghan, or Afghan-Pakistani, organization which really grew up during the 20 years that there were millions of Afghan refugees in Pakistan -- where the only education available for them was in madrassas, often in the [autonomous] tribal territories [along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan]. And it recruited from those people. They have an agenda about Afghanistan. They did not have a global terrorist agenda. So it's a completely different type of organization and problem [than Al-Qaeda]," Rubin says.

Rubin says the differences between the two groups reflect the fundamental differences in the outlook of their leadership.

"Mullah Omar, the leader of the Tailban, had never actually been to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, [before it came under Taliban control in 1996]. In fact, he has never stayed overnight in Kabul even though he was the head of state of the country. He is a very parochial, local-minded figure. Whereas, Osama bin Laden -- the head of Al-Qaeda -- grew up very wealthy in Saudi Arabia, speaks several languages, and traveled around the world, including to the West. His aides were all educated at universities. Most of the bombers on September 11th had been living in Europe and had university educations," Rubin said.

Rahul Bedi is a specialist on terrorism in South Asia for the London-based publication "Jane's Terrorism and Security Monitor."

"Al-Qaeda were a highly specialized group of people who were drawn from all over the Islamic world. Some of the people who were in Al-Qaeda, in a sense, belong to the 'class of the 1980s' who operated in the jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. They were drawn from various Muslim countries, including Pakistan, but also a lot of the Arab countries. And they also had a very close connection with the Saudi Arabian Wahabbi sect -- which is an esoteric sect of Islam," Bedi says.

Like many military experts in South Asia and the United States, Bedi believes the Taliban movement was initially fostered by Pakistan's military and intelligence agencies in an attempt to influence events within Afghanistan.

"The Taliban actually grew from within Pakistan itself. Most of the cadres of the Taliban were youngsters who had been brought up in the various Islamic seminaries in principally two provinces of Pakistan -- Baluchistan and the neighboring Northwestern Frontier Province. These were the people who were then installed in Kabul -- with the help of [Pakistan's] military and Inter Services Intelligence in terms of supply lines, information, and finance," Bedi says.

After 11 September, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf announced that Pakistan was severing all ties with the Taliban and was joining the United States in the war against terror. But both Bedi and Rubin note that much of Pakistan's effort in the antiterrorism campaign has focused on Al-Qaeda fighters rather than Taliban hard-liners who fled into Pakistan.

In recent months, Afghan Transitional Administration Hamid Karzai and the U.S. military have indicated their willingness to work with former members of the Taliban who were not among its hard-line membership and who are not carrying out attacks aimed at derailing Afghanistan's transition to democracy.

Bedi is critical of making any distinction between what the U.S. military refers to as "hard Taliban" and "soft Taliban."

"By letting the Taliban survive, the Western countries -- and especially the United States, in a sense, is conceding its fight against terrorism. Initially, the fight was not only directed against Al-Qaeda, but also against the Tailban [for] the removal of the Taliban [regime from Afghanistan]. But I think as happened subsequently in Iraq, the Americans thought very little about how to wage the peace rather than waging the war. With hindsight, the Americans and the British did not anticipate what would come afterwards. And that's why there is this deal-making going on with the Taliban -- which, in a sense, is quite hypocritical," Bedi says.

But it is on that point that Bedi and Rubin disagree. "You cannot classify people and eliminate them from politics forever because in the course of this extraordinarily difficult, painful and complex series of wars over the last 25 years, at some point or another, they joined an organization that we have labeled as being an enemy of the United States," Rubin says.

Rubin concludes the label "Taliban" is now being used in a political way by people who are trying to monopolize power in Afghanistan by excluding large portions of the Pashtun population. He says the only people who should be excluded from politics in Afghanistan are those who have committed war crimes or continue to fight against the new internationally backed constitutional order.

[Harry Beanbag]

I thought we went to Afghanistan to find and kill Osama and bring wrath upon those who helped him.


I think that's a common misunderstanding that average people have that keeps them from "getting" the GWOT. I really do think the Bush administration had a long term strategy. Although they either did a horrible job of explaining it or never tried to, or thought that laying it out in the open would compromise the success of it.

The GWOT, which Iraq is part of whether people choose to believe it or not, was not a revenge war just to get OBL. It was grander in scope and was meant to provoke a worldwide change or ending of Muslim extremism. Whether it has worked to any degree or ever will, or if we have the will to pursue it to conclusion are questions nobody can answer with any certainty.

[yermom]

that's what got us behind going into Afghanistan.

the GWOT is like the war on drugs. it's never going to end. how do you eradicate guerilla warfare?

[Harry Beanbag]

http://www.whokilledbambi.co.uk/public/2007/07/kill-em-all.jpg


;)

[Jacie]

How do you end the GWOT?

I think of other wars and they usually ended after one side had had enough and yelled, "We surrender!"

In this case though, the enemy recruits from people whose lives by our standards are already a cesspool. How do we make them yell, "We surrender!" when they seemingly have nothing to lose?

Killing/capturing Bin Laden isn't going to change a thing. Even if the Western world somehow manages to bring Afghanistan/Pakistan under something resembling control (i.e. no more Taliban, no more al-Qaeda) there is still the entire and not insignificant country of Iran to deal with.

I think our administration wants us to buy into the idea that it is fighting the GWOT and not equate that with the greater problem of our belief in things like personal freedom, equal rights and such being in direct conflict with the beliefs of the Muslim world.

This is in some ways another version of the Cold War, two diametrically opposed idealogies and neither side ready to take up arms against the other (one side at least seemingly growing more willing by the day, however). I am just tossing out random speculation here but I think the main thing that has kept our side from getting into it with the Muslims has a lot to do with where the bulk of known global oil reserves are located (and don't we all dream of the day when we can tell them what they can do with it once we figure out a way to live without it!).

On the plus side, if the conflict between the West and the Moslem-aligned nations ever did become shooting war, it would have an old war kind of resolution where fighting would stop once one side got the other to yell, "We surrender!"

Now if only we could figure out how to finish this GWOT thing . . .

[yermom]

the thing with the Cold War was that it was basically the USSR pushing the ideology of communism, not that communism was just this widespread ideology that happened to exist in a bunch of countries. you need a government for communism, and usually another country propping you up in the first place

terrorism doesn't really require this. i'm not sure what "old war" kind of thinking you are talking about. we've already gone past this in Iraq and Afghanistan there is no government to topple anymore. it's not like Germany or Japan that folded and cooperated once they were defeated. it's more like France where they hid out organized and blew **** up in secret

[OklahomaTuba]

Now if only we could figure out how to finish this GWOT thing . . .Its not called the GWOT anymore. Obama renamed it to "Overseas Contingency Operation". War is too harsh of a word and might offend the terrorists or something I guess.

[yermom]

or it doesn't really apply the way you guys try to use it


war, n.

1.
a. A state of open, armed, often prolonged conflict carried on between nations, states, or parties.
b. The period of such conflict.
c. The techniques and procedures of war; military science.

2.
a. A condition of active antagonism or contention: a war of words; a price war.
b. A concerted effort or campaign to combat or put an end to something considered injurious: the war against acid rain.


you guys talk like it's 1,a but it's really 2,b

[OklahomaTuba]

I'm sure the victims of 9/11 would think the GWOT is more than a "war of words" or "war against acid rain".

[Harry Beanbag]

or it doesn't really apply the way you guys try to use it




you guys talk like it's 1,a but it's really 2,b


I think Muslim extremism would fall into the "parties" category.

[yermom]

not all Muslim extremists are terrorists

[landrun]

yermom, I think that's the rub really.

To the conservative, it really is 1a. To the liberal, it is 2b.
Which is why a conservative would never read a terrorist his 'rights'.
It's war -a real war like we've fought in the Colonial war all the way up to WWII etc... not some ideological difference that make libs run around with picket signs saying "Stop terrorism now. It's not nice!" etc...

[Harry Beanbag]

not all Muslim extremists are terrorists

You're splitting hairs. The Islamic terrorists that we are fighting are Muslim extremists, no?

[GrapevineSooner]

I think what yermom is saying is there's a difference between somebody, such as an imam holding an extreme viewpoint, and a terrorist who acts upon that belief and kills infidels.

[JohnnyMack]

I think what yermom is saying is there's a difference between somebody, such as an imam holding an extreme viewpoint, and a terrorist who acts upon that belief and kills infidels.

Like a radical right wing preacher railing against abortion and a guy who acts upon that belief and shoots an abortion doctor.


<runs away>

[Harry Beanbag]

I think what yermom is saying is there's a difference between somebody, such as an imam holding an extreme viewpoint, and a terrorist who acts upon that belief and kills infidels.

We're fighting the later are we not, or is it really a war on Islam after all?

Of course, I still believe the root of the issue has little to do with religion and is still about power and money, just like everything else. Dude carrying an AK-47 and blowing himself up in markets is just a pawn.

[JohnnyMack]

Of course, I still believe the root of the issue has little to do with religion and is still about power and money, just like everything else. Dude carrying an AK-47 and blowing himself up in markets is just a pawn.

These people are still mad that whitey got they oil. The Turkish Petroleum Co or whatever the hell they called it started all this.

[yermom]

yermom, I think that's the rub really.

To the conservative, it really is 1a. To the liberal, it is 2b.
Which is why a conservative would never read a terrorist his 'rights'.
It's war -a real war like we've fought in the Colonial war all the way up to WWII etc... not some ideological difference that make libs run around with picket signs saying "Stop terrorism now. It's not nice!" etc...

how do you end this war then? when is it over? when we sign some treaty? who would we sign it with?

one doesn't even need a group to be a terrorist, or a muslim

[The Remnant]

Only radical right wing preachers rail against abortion?

[OklahomaTuba]

Only radical right wing preachers rail against abortion?
Maybe we can just abort all the terrorists???

It may work out well, since killing/touching/disturbing terrorists is a "war crime", yet murdering millions of innocent babies, most of which are of color BTW, is ok and even encouraged.

Hell, ObamaCare might even pay for it!

[The Remnant]

Tuba. You've got to prioritize. The whale, the rainforest and the spotted owl are higher up on their list.

[JohnnyMack]

Only radical right wing preachers rail against abortion?

Only radical Muslim's have a negative view of westerners?*

*Tuba, this is where you say something witty about Obama.

[The Remnant]

Al-Qaeda is more like a 21st century version of the Sons of Liberty. You know. One if by land. Two if by sea. And three if by flying a jumbo jet into a nearby skyscraper.

[TAFBSooner]

I think that's a common misunderstanding that average people have that keeps them from "getting" the GWOT. I really do think the Bush administration had a long term strategy. Although they either did a horrible job of explaining it or never tried to, or thought that laying it out in the open would compromise the success of it.

Do you have any understanding of that strategy? If not, what's your evidence for believing the Bush administration had such a strategy? I heard those claims from the right wing at the time, but never an explanation.


The GWOT, which Iraq is part of whether people choose to believe it or not, was not a revenge war just to get OBL. It was grander in scope and was meant to provoke a worldwide change or ending of Muslim extremism. Whether it has worked to any degree or ever will, or if we have the will to pursue it to conclusion are questions nobody can answer with any certainty.

How, exactly, was invading and occupying a secular Arab tyranny meant to help in the alleged overall goal of changing or ending Muslim extremism?

Finally, how do you know when you have won the "war?"

[King Crimson]

Al-Qaeda is more like a 21st century version of the Sons of Liberty. You know. One if by land. Two if by sea. And three if by flying a jumbo jet into a nearby skyscraper.

ya think? i'd be interested to hear more from you about this.

because i doubt you mean it.

[Harry Beanbag]

Do you have any understanding of that strategy? If not, what's your evidence for believing the Bush administration had such a strategy? I heard those claims from the right wing at the time, but never an explanation.

What's your evidence that they didn't? Just the fact that they didn't invite you to sit down in their National Security planning briefings doesn't count. And I'm not from the right wing, so put that red herring back in the box.




How, exactly, was invading and occupying a secular Arab tyranny meant to help in the alleged overall goal of changing or ending Muslim extremism?

God, not this **** again. We've had these discussions on this board ad nauseum for the last 6 years. If you don't agree with the GWOT, it's fine by me, you most likely will never be convinced otherwise.



Finally, how do you know when you have won the "war?"

Hell if I know. When rich Muslims stop financing global terrorism and cease the brainwashing of their fellow gullible Muslims to blow themselves and innocent people up? Maybe that's not a realistic goal, but I don't mind giving it a try instead of just bending over for them.

[Scott D]

These people are still mad that whitey got they oil. The Turkish Petroleum Co or whatever the hell they called it started all this.

you mean British Petroleum...aka BP.

[JohnnyMack]

you mean British Petroleum...aka BP.

Didn't all the oil companies make a big conglomerate?

Standard Oil, BP, etc?

[Scott D]

Well, BP set up a variety of offshoot companies in various countries in that region in their imperialism drive for oil pumping purposes. The end result was that 95% of the monies gained went to line British pockets, and maybe 5% stayed in country. But for the life of me I can't imagine why that would create any sort of resentment and backlash against the Western World, especially when the US got left holding the Bag after the failings of both the English and Dutch in the Middle East, and the French in Southeast Asia.

[TAFBSooner]

Originally Posted by TAFBSooner
Finally, how do you know when you have won the "war?"




Hell if I know. When rich Muslims stop financing global terrorism and cease the brainwashing of their fellow gullible Muslims to blow themselves and innocent people up? Maybe that's not a realistic goal, but I don't mind giving it a try instead of just bending over for them.

How do rich Wahhabi Muslims get that way? Could it be that you and I send them a few bucks every time we fill up? I should get off this board and find out how to convert my Prius to natural gas, because I f'n can't stand to think about how I'm helping to finance people that are trying to kill us.

One president:texan: holds hands with their prince:texan: , then the next one bows to the same guy:texan: after he becomes their king. I don't know why we aren't all beating down the doors for mass transit, and/or the Pickens plan.