The Taliban are socialists

The New York Times reports how Taliban is exploiting Class divide in the Swat valley and plan to extend this elsewhere:

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — The Taliban have advanced deeper into Pakistan by engineering a class revolt that exploits profound fissures between a small group of wealthy landlords and their landless tenants, according to government officials and analysts here.

The strategy cleared a path to power for the Taliban in the Swat Valley, where the government allowed Islamic law to be imposed this week, and it carries broad dangers for the rest of Pakistan, particularly the militants' main goal, the populous heartland of Punjab Province.

In Swat, accounts from those who have fled now make clear that the Taliban seized control by pushing out about four dozen landlords who held the most power. To do so, the militants organized peasants into armed gangs that became their shock troops, the residents, government officials and analysts said. The approach allowed the Taliban to offer economic spoils to people frustrated with lax and corrupt government even as the militants imposed a strict form of Islam through terror and intimidation. [link]

Some blog coverage: cheap talk, just one minute.

In a sense this should not have been so surprising to the western intellectuals of various hues but for the constant propaganda by communists and leftists. In a sense, the whole of west including their top strategic thinkers and needless to say intellegentia elsewhere who parrot them including our own have fallen prey to this myth making. 

In a CNN-IBN TV report a couple of years ago, a set of people violently agitating against Taslima Nasreen was called - religious right-wing protesters.

As a matter of fact, the "religious right-wing" concept is a smart invention but has little to do with historical reality. Fascist regimes of all kinds are virulently leftist and nationalist. Which set of loonies drive which other set depends on who is the driver. 

Religion, especially the organized type have almost always backed socialism. However, they have always backed the existing feudal regime or monarchy if they feared persecution in regimes falling into communism. 

This will make fighting the Taliban led insurgencies that much harder, if not downright impossible.