[LINK] "People Turning Against Taliban"

[rfmcdonald]

Yet another news report (this one from Inter Press Service's Ashfaq Yusufzai) suggesting that the inhabitants of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region are turning strongly against the Taliban and its local proxies.

"It is not surprising that the Taliban’s popularity graph is dwindling. They no longer enjoy the quantum of public support they had at the time of the attack on Afghanistan by U.S.-led forces," said Jamilur Rehman, a resident of South Waziristan and a student at the University of Peshawar.

Rehman hopes that the Taliban will soon vanish because they are rapidly losing local support. Quite apart from the horror of the atrocities themselves, killing women and children has also weakened the Taliban, he says.

Led by religious sentiments, thousands of people donated generously - and thousands of youths from Pakistan travelled to Afghanistan - to fight alongside the Taliban against U.S. forces in Sep. 2001. Millions of rupees were collected by religious parties in the name of supporting the Taliban.

[. . .]

[In the October 2001 elections] the people were also on the side of the Taliban, and the MMA received 11 per cent of the total vote in 2002 - with 3,349,436 ballots cast in favour. In contrast, during the election in 2008 the religious parties alliance won only six seats in the National Assembly with a total of 772,798 votes.

"Killing of respected religious scholars such as Dr. Muhammad Farooq Khan, Maulana Hasan Jan and Mufti Farooq Naeemi further eroded the Taliban’s public outlook," Majeed Shah, a teacher in the political science department of the Gomal University Dera Ismail Khan told IPS. "The people who held them in high esteem are now cursing them because of their follies."

[. . .]

"Our children cannot go out of our homes due to curfew and the continuous battles. Taliban don’t allow children to play and go to schools. How can we support them," said Jamal Akbar, once a strong supporter of the Taliban. Akbar, a shopkeeper in South Waziristan, said people were becoming poorer due to the Taliban’s activities.

"Attacking mosques and schools has deeply hurt the people’s sentiments and the Taliban are attacking both," said Wajid Ali, 25, a teacher at a religious school in Khyber Agency - one of the seven tribal agencies in FATA.

Go, read.