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Knight Ridder's Jonathan Landay reports on a new al Qaeda-funded Taliban emerging as a serious security threat in Afghanistan:
Posted by Laura at August 19, 2005 05:28 PMInstead of collapsing, however, the movement transformed itself. When the snows melted this past spring, the Taliban surprised Afghan and U.S. commanders with its renewed insurgency.
"We were all under the assumption that things in the country were under control," Defense Minister Wardak said.
Afghan and Western officials alleged that the escalating insurgency is being aided by Pakistan's powerful military intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence.
Islamabad, they charged, seeks a weak government in Kabul that it can influence. It also wants to keep tensions boiling in Pashtun-dominated areas on the frontier to block a settlement of a decades-old border dispute that the new Afghan Parliament is expected to try to end, they said.
"Pakistan is ... fanning the flames," charged Latfullah Maashal, the chief spokesman of the Afghan Interior Ministry. "The Pakistanis ... do not want to see a strong, peaceful and prosperous country (Afghanistan)."