A new insurgent group has emerged in Afghanistan, breaking off from the Taliban and even more extreme, and is on a campaign to terrorize Afghan officials and even more moderate insurgents.
The Taliban has publicly disavowed the new group and its “current campaign of psychological and terror attacks,” as Afghan officials described it, is a window into the violence and militancy that will plague Afghanistan for years going forward.
The group calls itself the Mullah Dadullah Front, after a notoriously bloodthirsty Taliban commander who was killed in 2007. Members have sent messages and made telephone calls to people in the Afghan Parliament, threatening increased violence if they vote in favor of the strategic partnership agreement between the U.S. and Afghanistan.
The strategic partnership agreement signed earlier this month by Washington and Kabul would maintain a significant U.S. presence in Afghanistan until at least 2024. The U.S. will continue the war, including conducting night raids and drone strikes into Pakistan, well beyond this 2014 date.
President Obama has claimed the Taliban’s momentum has been broken, but in a report submitted in early May to Congress, the Pentagon acknowledged a “resilient” Taliban and in January the National Intelligence Estimate concluded the war is still a “stalemate,” that the Taliban are still strong.
The rise of the new, more radical insurgent group in Afghanistan demonstrates how failed the U.S. mission in the country has been and how strong the insurgency will continue to be so long as the U.S. refuses to leave.
I get the impression that each and every new development about the Taliban is just BS, MISO and PsyOps to justify further war. Ask yourself, what advantage do you, as an American citizen get from spending cast amounts of blood and treasure to maintain Karzai's narcostate?
No sh*t, Sherlock. What else do you expect when you have these whores slaughtering women and children right and left? According to a terrific article written by Jeremy Scahill a year or so ago after spending months in Afghanistan, the outrage at the foreign invaders is such that every time one civilian is killed, another 10 take up arms to fight them. The US is the biggest recruiter of insurgents everywhere it goes.
It is probably a CIA designed group to go one over Taliban in an effort to attract the more extreme elements and the unsatisfied, and thus gradually discredit and push the Taliban aside. Once Taliban is thus weakened, the CIA will turn its men on them and get rid of Taliban. It looks like a nice plan, but I don’t know if it works.