Canadians in Afghanistan

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by AlternateGray

Most of the new members weren't locals. They were foreigners, mostly Pakistanis and Arabs, who saw their chance to jump on the bandwagon to power. The movement changed: while the original Taliban were local Islamic scholars offended by the actions of the warlords, they weren't necessarily extremists. The new Taliban was most definitely a hard-core fundamentalist group with a heavily foreign, specifically Arabic, influence, and they actually began to lose some of the support of the people.

My understanding of the downfall of the Taliban is that this group drew practically all its movers and shakers from the Pashto-speaking quarter of Afghanistan and everybody who wasn't Pashtun was pretty much excluded. The excluded got resentful. Then they got a chance to do something about it.

In a nation, such as it is, where everybody's definition of "foreigners" is "those people in the next valley," you're going to get a very great deal of this. Add to the mix property being insecure and no social mechanism at all for keeping general order and causing benevolence to be the order of the day -- and you have Afghanistan. The place ever gets overall order and it's going to be a marvel of liberty -- a likely effect (though not inevitable, just likely) of all those separate communities, walled off in their valleys.