Claudio Franco: How and why the Taliban fight

This is a nice piece of reporting by Claudio Franco of the San Francisco Chronicle foreign service which describes, among other things:

• The uneasy alliance between the Taliban and the "Arabs," who are seen as trigger happy and intent on martyrdom. "They won't stop shooting even when they are told to. And they always write messages home before a battle -- they get ready to die. I know them well, and I don't like them; they just don't trust Afghans." says one Taliban fighter. Another: "Some of them stay for six months and then go back, nobody knows where. They pay a lot to get in and out. None of them will talk, but they come here to train, I guess. Al Qaeda has its own network in Konar and Nuristan; they don't need us."
• The confidence the Taliban have in their tactics: "The U.S. helicopters cannot land if we are around, and they can't always target us from the air. They know we only need a split second to hit them and disappear. We only assemble with other units for large-scale attacks. With a few hours' advance notice, we can be virtually anywhere in the province. Once we have split up, it's extremely difficult to locate us without risking being hit."
• The resentment stirred by merging humanitarian and military roles in the PRT model: "They are uniformed soldiers, not nurses," says one Taliban.

(NB: Barnett Rubin notes that "This groups seems to be Hizb-i Islami Hikmatyar, not Taliban. Maybe the distinction is not so clear anymore, but Kashmir Khan is a major Hikmatyar commander." Either way, the article is insightful...)

In remote Afghan camp, Taliban explain how and why they fight
Konar, Jan 21, 2007 (SF Chron) by Claudio Franco  --...After months of protracted negotiations, Kashmir Khan, the Taliban insurgents' overall commander in Konar and Nuristan provinces, consented to the visit of a Western journalist to meet with these fighters, and guaranteed security...Musa Khan said his unit had 25 to 30 fighters, a handful of whom were deployed on the hilltops surrounding the interim base, securing all the potential access routes to the camp. This is how the Taliban operate in the eastern provinces, Musa Khan explained through a translator -- "groups of 20 to 40 lightly equipped men who are extremely mobile and effective in this rugged terrain."