Leaving aside the false binary of good-bad Taliban, one must understand the inter-textuality of the Taliban and their supporters. One cannot understand the Taliban phenomenon in 2013 without understanding that they are financed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, apart from the Pakistani diaspora in various countries. In turn, one cannot discount the significance of these four factors in the economic survival of Pakistan. And one cannot underestimate the support for the Taliban within Pakistan itself.

You will be absolutely wrong if you thought that the Taliban, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) and the Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat (ASWJ) are three different outfits, and not three incarnations of ‘Islamofascism’.

Zaidi, Abbas. “The Future of Taliban.” Viewpoint, May 30, 2013.

Sociolinguist Abbas Zaidi, knows the Pakistani character and its politics with keen sensibility, and so I thought to pass the above link into the BackChannels information stream.

# # #