Recommended websites, part II: The Taliban speak...

If you want a snapshot understanding of who the Taliban are and why they fight - right at the grass roots level - then these interviews make compulsive viewing.  A standard list of 20 questions was put to over 40 self-professed Taliban fighters by an Afghan on behalf of Canadian journalists in the Kandahar area earlier this year.  OK, the process is flawed almost by definition and unrepresentative in many ways.  The Canadian slant to the questions becomes occasionally and unintentionally comic - lets face it, if a mid-20s Taliban fighter doesn't know who Bush is, he is not going to know Steven Harper or Stephane Dion (and frankly, I had to do a quick google on the latter...).  

But what you get is the impression of almost total ignorance of the wider world (""Who is Bush", "where is Canada"), a fanatical devotion to killing non-Muslems until they leave Afghanistan and a blind acceptance of whatever the Mullahs teach them regarding interpretations of the Koran (on issues such as growing poppy and suicide bombers).  Almost to a man they believed that large parts of Pakistan (Peshawar and Quetta) belonged to Afghanistan, which was an interesting insight into historic Pushtun tribal grievances. 

But most worrying of all, although their understanding of the world is limited, they appear much more unified in their understanding of what they are doing and why than if you were to put American, British, German and French soldiers in a room together and ask them...