CAMP THUNDER: Taliban militants in Pakistan have established an increasingly close relationship with insurgents from across the border in Afghanistan, supplying them with explosives and well-trained fighters, a senior Afghan army commander said yesterday.
The Taliban in Pakistan have always operated separately from their Afghan namesakes, fighting to topple the democratically elected government in Islamabad and establish a strict Islamic sharia state in the nuclear-armed nation of 180 million people.
But in recent weeks the two groups have secretly agreed to work together, with Pakistani militants announcing a ceasefire with their government in order to preserve militant bases used to stage cross-border attacks.
Major General Muhammad Shareef Yaftali, in charge of several eastern provinces on or near the Afghan border with Pakistan, said this relationship was growing stronger.
“They are working together now. They are going to hold this relationship. It helps them,” Yaftali, commander of the 203rd Corps, said. “The Afghan and Pakistani Taliban have the same ideology. They are the same people. They are of the same school.”
The alliance complicates the picture for Yaftali’s troops as they try to bring law and order to some of the most violent and inaccessible areas of Afghanistan where militants linked to Al Qaeda are believed to be holed up in remote mountain lairs.
But some are sceptical about the Taliban’s current ability to inflict heavy losses, pointing to the fact that there were no major attacks during last weekend’s presidential election in Afghanistan which the insurgents had vowed to disrupt.
Afghanistan has a notoriously bad relationship with Pakistan and often accuses its neighbour, as well as its ISI intelligence agency, of supporting militants and helping stage attacks on Afghan soil.
Militant commanders said the recent ceasefire was mainly imposed on the Taliban by the shadowy Pakistani Haqqani network. REUTERS
