Taliban or Al-Qaeda, Who Would You Choose?

So I was reading about how Musharraf is more concerned with security on the Afghan border and rooting out the Taliban rather than hunting down Osama bin Laden on the Newsweeks, and I was reminded of a class reading.

What if you were in Musharraf's position, would you make the same decision?

If I had limited resources and had to choose between put more effort into fighting the Taliban on my borders or hunting bin Laden within my country, I'd go for the former. The Taliban is a greater threat than Al-Qaeda, in my view. The Taliban has something Al-Qaeda does not, a political objective which gains a lot more supporters on the ground than an anarchist organization could ever hope to have, or at least the potential to have more.

Oh, look, I've used a new word from my reading. Anarchism. No, not the smelly drain pipe jeaned punk rock commies that run around middle class areas. The other kind.

"Unlike Hamas or Hizbullah, al-Qaeda has not organized a mass-based political machine, nor has it built a network of social welfare organizations. As a matter of fact, besides its single-minded focus on jihad, al-Qaeda has no program. While Hamas and Hizbullah wage campaigns of national liberation, al-Qaeda identifies with no particular struggle."

and

"Like other anarchist movements, al-Qaeda is reactive. It focuses solely on resisting what it considers to be an intrusive alien order and preserving a culture and lifestyle and the homeland of that culture and lifestyle its members believe to be under attack. Unlike other movements whose discourse it shares, al-Qaeda does not operate as a cog within the international state and economic systems. Rather it wars on those systems."

The Modern Middle East: A History
James L. Gelvin

My radical new idea is to abandon the term "jihadis" when referring to the AQ. I'm going to say anarchists, and maybe add a nice little modifier like "international" or "third world". We'll see.

B T dubbs, RIP Heath Ledger. I loved Brokeback Mountain.

I also feel compelled to say bin Laden is very very bad. It should be obvious, but I think we've all been made to feel a little paranoid about what we say, and I'm not taking any chances. I made the graphic too.