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Taliban extend sphere of influence, expert says - Monsters and Critics Kabul - Afghanistan's Taliban militants are expanding their influence further into regions outside their traditional power base, the Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN) said. 'Their intake from non-Pashtun ethnic groups is growing, from where the Taliban hardly recruited in the past,' AAN co-director Thomas Ruttig said. That trend was particularly obvious in Kunduz province in north-eastern Afghanistan, where German troops are based, he said. In a report released Tuesday, the AAN criticized a significant lack of understanding about the nature of the Taliban movement by the international community. The Taliban were no longer a tribal Pashtun movement, but have turned into a political Islamist movement in which ethnicity no longer plays a role, which opened the Taliban to non-Pashtuns, Ruttig said. An increasing number of Afghan Tajik and Uzbek commanders were joinin...