The Pakistani Taliban admitted to destroying 16 NATO fuel tankers yesterday in the Dera Murad Jamali area in the southwestern province of Baluchistan. From NDTV:
Pakistani Taliban spokesman Azam Tariq in a phone call to AFP claimed responsibility for the attack.
“It is in retaliation to drone attacks in tribal areas,” Tariq said from an undisclosed location in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. “We will continue to attack NATO supply vehicles and warn those operating them to immediately stop doing it otherwise they may also be targeted,” he said.
“We have assigned our fighters to go after the NATO supply tankers wherever in Pakistan,” Tariq told The Associated Press by phone from an undisclosed location. “We want to make very, very difficult all land routes for NATO in Pakistan.”
While the Taliban routinely attack and destroy NATO fuel and supply trucks moving through Baluchistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, they rarely take credit for attacks in Baluchistan. The Taliban have also been leaning heavily of late on the Predator strikes for justification for their attacks. Tariq made this argument to justify the Jan. 12 suicide attack on a police station in Bannu that killed 20 people.
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3 Comments
Its surely(?) in both Irans and the United States (and her NATO backed and supported administration within Kabul!) interests that the Salafista Sunni Taliban are unable to get back into any semblance of power within Afghanistan…
Maybe time for a bit of ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours,’ between the regional and global powers respectively here?
Alliances often come from the most unlikely of sources.
So the question is what is Kayani signaling by easing the leash on his dogs of war?
This is note in dating circles as Push-Pull.
In negotiations the idea is to stay bi-polar.
ALL of this is ISI playing Push-Pull.
Virtually by clockwork, the ISI is going bipolar on the CIA.
Naturally, they expect us to be so dumb as to not figure their game.
The readership is probably aware that such lost tankers come at the expense of Pakistan. We don’t pay for non-delivery — it’s part of the boilerplate in our contracts. ( Otherwise, we’d scarcely see ANY deliveries!)
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I’d say that this action is a sop to the anti-Pushtun Taliban. The ISI must be getting plenty of kvetching and moaning from them.
Hence, the recent drone attacks must be SUPER effective. The more they squeal you know that you’ve hit home.