Thursday, January 21, 2010
Rewriting history at The New York Times
Under a headline reading "Taliban Overhaul Image to Win Allies," we find it's The New York Times who's the one doing a little bit of "overhauling"...of history:
The Taliban...are recasting themselves increasingly as a local liberation movement, independent of Al Qaeda.
"Recasting" themselves as a "local liberation movement"? The Taliban have been fighting since Oct. 7, 2001 to rid their country of a foreign occupation.
"Independent of Al Qaeda"? A little history: Al Qaeda was founded in 1988; the Taliban predate them by many years. And as this humble blog was writing as far back as 2003, the Taliban and Al Qaeda were never interchangeable words, as much as the U.S. government and the American corporate media attempted to make them so, in their attempt to justify overthrowing the government of Afghanistan and the continued occupation of that country. The Taliban may have been (are) a reactionary fundamentalist religious group, but they are in at least one respect the opposite of Al Qaeda. Why? Because Al Qaeda attacked U.S. targets, whereas the Taliban not only never attacked U.S. targets, but were themselves attacked by the U.S. (and have been fighting back ever since). They were never "dependent" on Al Qaeda and, despite questionable claims that the Taliban were "harboring" Al Qaeda on Sept. 11, 2001 (questionable because the Taliban were no more in complete control of the entire country than is the Karzai government today), Al Qaeda was certainly never "dependent" on the Taliban either.
