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Why The Taliban Are More Violent This Year
September 2, 2005: Officially, the Taliban has announced that it will not attempt to disrupt national elections, scheduled for September 18th. Nevertheless, expect the number, and perhaps intensity, of Taliban/Al-Qaeda attacks to increase over the next two weeks. Recently, there has been a steadily rising number of assassination attempts against candidates and election officials, several of whom have been killed or wounded.

In anticipation of increased Taliban/Al-Qaeda activity, the Pakistani Army is boosting, or redeploying, its forces along the Afghan border, to help implement block cross-border movement of personnel or actual attacks being staged from Pakistani territory.

The increase in Taliban violence comes from three sources. First, there is more money in play, to pay Taliban volunteers to fight. The money is apparently coming from al Qaeda sources in Saudi Arabia the Persian Gulf. Second, hard core Taliban tribal leaders are upset at the many pro-Taliban tribal chiefs who have made peace with the government. Third, Pakistani military operations along the border have driven several hundred al Qaeda members, who had fled to Pakistan in 2001, back into Afghanistan. Afghan and Coalition forces are also beefing up security on the Afghan side of the border.

Indian and Chinese firms continue to bid for construction projects in Afghanistan, despite the risks from bandits (who are into kidnapping, robbery and extortion). The construction firms just add the security costs to their proposals.
Posted by: Steve 2005-09-02
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=128434