If you as an Afghan just go about your business, they pretty much leave you alone. The more you do things seen as pro-West or pro-government, the more they lean on you, starting with night letters and moving up. They put out a few checkpoints to get some local revenue, or confiscate food or lodgings when they need them, but so do the police. Other than that, from your regular Afghan in the south the insurgent presence can be pretty much entirely benign, so long as you overtly play by their rules.

The theory of counterinsurgency is that villagers, once given security and services, will inform on the insurgents. In reality, the Pashtun Taliban aren’t oppressing the villagers, and the coalition doesn’t have the troops to provide security in many areas.

This is something I’ve wondered about for some time, and honestly I don’t think there’s any way for me to get to a real answer, or even ask the question without sounding like a paranoid crank. Over the last several decades, it has become increasingly obvious that my government practices propaganda dissemination and disinformation for it’s own ends and purposes. There can be no doubt that the concerned parties work hard to frame the discussion in a manner favorable to their aims and agenda, and it would be unrealistically naive to accept any description of the Taliban or the larger Afghan and Pakistani insurgencies at face value. I remember how any real deep consideration of the motivations of the 9/11 hijackers was, to put it delicately, aggressively discouraged in favor of the more simplistic explanation “they are evil”.

The information we receive here in the US about the Taliban is so uniformly awful as to be caricature, more comic-book minions of great evil than other real human beings with goals and grievances. If you want to experience this, just make some kind of vanilla statement about the Taliban not being the personification of evil on earth and see how quickly someone shows up to tell you that you need to do a little more research on the murdering, raping, oppressing evil scum that has the temerity to shoot at good pure american men and women for NO REASON at all. Hell, I’ve had it happen to me in these very comment pages.

There can be no doubt that the reality of the situation is far more complex and nuanced than we are being led to believe, and there are not only people providing dishonest or at least incomplete information in order to demonize the enemy in wartime, but people who actively discourage any exploration or discussion of these questions. It is neither unpatriotic nor treasonous to try to develop a more complete understanding of your enemy, and if you try to do so you will find that he is more and more like you and me. That is the nature of the beast.

mikey