Voices on Afghanistan: Who threatens the Afghan government?

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The National (UAE), 3 May 2014

Full interview with AAN’s Borhan Osman, explaining how the Taleban persist as the main threat to the Afghan government and describing differences between the Taleban of Afghanistan and in Pakistan. He actually speaks about “two types of armed actors threatening security and state stability in Afghanistan. One is a relatively well-organised insurgency and another is the warlords and armed groups who challenge the authority of the central government and are responsible for insecurity in parts of the country”. The lattee threat to security, he adds “is of no lesser scale than the Taliban”. He calls the (Afghan) Taleban “a rather close-knit group and it is difficult to find distinct entities within it”. While groups “on the very local level… sometimes [are] following different chains of command, … that difference will disappear as you get to a higher level.” He further adds that there has been “no single successful split over the Taliban’s decade-long insurgency. Any attempt at breaking away has led to isolation of the person or commander involved.” The Pakistani Taleban he describes as “a newer phenomenon… inspired by the Afghan Taliban [but] a separate entity from the Afghan Taliban”.