Today, much of the violence is mischaracterised as “Taliban” insurgent violence, when in fact it is not linked to the Taliban or the GIRoA, but is driven by local dynamics between groups and individuals on the ground. The Helmandis describe the conflict as pshe-pshe. This literally translates as “leg-leg”, but refers to the different legs of a tribe or clan (the English term would be “branch”). So, metaphorically, the phrase pshe-pshe means group-on-group warfare. It is a (micro) civil war.
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