History > 2006 > USA > Wars > Afghanistan (IV)

NYT        October 2, 2006

After Afghan Battle, a Harder Fight for Peace        NYT        3.10.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/world/asia/03afghan.html

Roland Paquette,

an injured veteran of the conflict in Afghanistan,

with his dog Rainbow, "Rainey" for short.

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times        31.10.2006

 Trained by Inmates, New Best Friends for Disabled Veterans        NYT

31.10.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/us/31dogs.html


 

Trained by Inmates, New Best Friends for Disabled Veterans

October 31, 2006
The New York Times
By STEPHANIE STROM

CONCORD, Mass., Oct. 27 — Rainbow looks like any other Labrador retriever, but she is not a pet. Trained by a prison inmate, her mission is to help Roland Paquette, an injured veteran of the conflict in Afghanistan, stay on his new feet, the ones he got after an explosion destroyed his legs.

While veterans who lose their sight or hearing or must use a wheelchair have long had “service” dogs as companions, Rainbow is one of the first dogs in the country trained to work with someone who uses both a wheelchair and prosthetics to get around.

Mr. Paquette’s hope is that eventually Rainbow will allow him to abandon his canes altogether and rely only on the metal handle attached to the harness she wears around her torso.

“I’d much rather be able to walk with her at my side than with the canes,” said Mr. Paquette, who is 28. “It makes me less obvious.”

Rainbow is the first graduate of a new program, Canines for Combat Veterans, at a tiny nonprofit group here called Neads, or New England Assistance Dog Services. The organization has been training service dogs for the disabled since 1976.

“I think we’re going to have to double the number of dogs we train to meet the need,” said Sheila O’Brien, Neads’s executive director. “Because of advances in medicine, a lot more veterans are surviving their injuries than ever before, and we want to be able to help as many of them as we can.”

In late 2001, President Bush signed a law authorizing the Veterans Administration to underwrite programs like Canines for Combat Veterans. But the Veterans Administration is still studying the matter, so Neads must raise all the money for its program from private sources.

It sells naming rights for its dogs — Rainbow got her name after a group of Rainbow Girls from Rhode Island, an organization affiliated with the Masons, held pancake breakfasts and other events to raise $500 for the right.

That fund-raising has proved so successful that Ms. O’Brien has doubled the price to name a dog, but she said it cost up to $17,000 to buy and train a dog. Recipients of dogs are expected to raise about $9,500 for their animal with the help of the organization.

Ms. O’Brien also hopes to double the size of a program in which service dogs are trained by prison inmates. Puppies begin their training in the Neads “nursery,” where they are housebroken and introduced to basic skills. Then about 80 percent of the dogs go to live in a prison cell with an inmate who completes their training.

It takes about half the time to train dogs in prison as it does in foster homes, Ms. O’Brien said, because of the more intensive training they get from inmates.

Inmates are enthusiastic about the program. “It’s great to do something that really helps someone else, especially a guy like him,” said Thomas Davison, who trained Rainbow at the Northeast Correctional Center here. “I’ve never had a chance to do that, and I wasn’t sure I could handle the responsibility.”

Kathleen M. Dennehy, the state correction commissioner, said the program had profound effects on the culture of a prison.

“Officers stop by to pat the dogs, they smile, maybe they strike up a conversation with the inmate training the dog,” Ms. Dennehy said. “It establishes a basic human connection.”

James J. Saba, superintendent at Northeast, is unsure, however, whether the program, already in six prisons in Massachusetts, can be expanded.

“We have 268 inmates in this prison alone, which is already too many,” Mr. Saba said. “And for every puppy, we lose a bed because the dogs take the place of an inmate in the cell.”

Mr. Paquette and Rainbow visited Mr. Davison and the four other inmate trainers at the prison on Thursday. Mr. Davison gave him a few pointers and handed over the toys he had bought the dog with the $28 a week he received for training her.

“She was ready to do this at 9 months,” Mr. Davison said proudly. “She’s a good dog.”

Mr. Paquette promised, “I’ll take good care of her.”

Mr. Paquette joined the military several months after the Sept. 11 attacks, leaving a job he had recently taken. “I felt like a hypocrite sitting around on the couch in front of the TV and saying, ‘Go do it,’ when I wasn’t,” he explained.

He became a medical sergeant on a Special Forces team and headed for Afghanistan in the spring of 2004. He said he treated hundreds of soldiers and thousands of local residents for “everything from the common cold to gunshot wounds.”

On Dec. 28, 2004, an explosion went off under the vehicle in which he was riding, severely injuring his legs. Yet he considers himself lucky that the impact was muted by the engine block, that an orthopedic surgeon happened to be on hand to perform the initial amputation and that new medical techniques have calmed the irritated nerves in his legs that threatened to keep him from walking.

“At least I’m here, and I’ve got Rainey,” he said, using his nickname for Rainbow.

He said that he had been nervous about meeting her — “sometimes chemistry just doesn’t work” — and that the first day of their partnership had been difficult. He had expected to get a bigger dog, who could support his weight, and Rainbow accidentally pulled him over when he was walking with her. The next day, however, Rainbow and Mr. Paquette clicked, taking turns outdoors using just a cane and her harness. The dog appeared to respond well to Mr. Paquette’s commands and looked to him more and more for direction.

He stayed in his wheelchair during his visit to Mr. Davison the next day because the Neads trainers were worried that Rainbow would pull him down again in her excitement to see her prison trainer. She was indeed happy to see him but largely remained at Mr. Paquette’s side.

The next challenge will be introducing her to Mr. Big, the German shepherd-Great Dane mix that is the Paquettes’ pet. He has been sent to obedience school in preparation for her arrival.

In about 10 days, Mr. Paquette and Rainbow will take off for their new life together, first in Albuquerque and then in San Antonio, where Mr. Paquette and his wife, Jennifer, and their daughter, Kristen, 17, and son, T. J., 11, are moving for his new job with an intelligence and security firm.

The Army has recently completed a new center in San Antonio specializing in amputation, the Intrepid Center, and Mr. Paquette expects to be an advertisement for service dogs.

“I’ve got a feeling that lots of guys who see me with Rainbow are going to want a dog,” he said.

    Trained by Inmates, New Best Friends for Disabled Veterans, NYT, 31.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/us/31dogs.html?hp&ex=1162357200&en=772ffbc56a3f3da8&ei=5094&partner=homepage

NATO says 70 suspected insurgents killed

Updated 10/29/2006 9:43 PM ET
AP
USA Today

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — NATO and Afghan troops killed 70 suspected militants who attacked a military base in southern Afghanistan, while a roadside blast killed one NATO soldier and wounded eight others, the alliance said Sunday.

Some 100 to 150 militants attacked a military base north of Tarin Kowt in Uruzgan on Saturday, said Maj. Luke Knittig, a spokesman for the NATO-led force. The alliance and Afghan troops fought back for several hours with small arms fire, attack helicopters and airstrikes.

Seventy insurgents were killed, Knittig said, upgrading an earlier estimate of 55 dead. One Afghan soldier was wounded. It was impossible to independently verify the death toll at the remote battle site.

The clash happened as NATO and Afghan troops press ahead with their new joint offensive — Operation Eagle — aimed at keeping pressure on the Taliban through the fall and winter, and to pave the way for long-promised development after the harshest fighting in five years.

On Sunday, a roadside blast killed one NATO soldier and wounded eight in Uruzgan, the alliance said. Three civilians were wounded. The nationalities of the slain and wounded soldiers were not disclosed.

Saturday's fighting and bombing in Uruzgan province came a day after an international human rights group criticized NATO-led troops in Afghanistan, saying their tactics increasingly endanger civilians and are turning the population against the Western alliance.

NATO's top commander apologized Saturday for civilian deaths caused by fighting between Taliban militants and NATO forces earlier in the week, but said insurgents endanger civilians by hiding among them.

"Sadly, in asymmetric warfare, when you're battling an insurgency, typically the insurgents do not play by the same rules that we would like to play by," U.S. Gen. James L. Jones said.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch complained Friday that NATO's recent operations have killed dozens of civilians, but it also criticized the Taliban and other insurgents for putting civilians at risk "by using populated areas to launch attacks on NATO and Afghan government forces."

Jones, the NATO commander, expressed regret for civilian deaths but said Taliban fighters use civilians as human shields and said that in the heat of battle it can be difficult to separate the two.

The death of a civilian "is something that causes anybody in uniform to lose a lot of sleep," Jones said at a news conference at Bagram, the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan.

His comments came four days after clashes between NATO-led troops and insurgents in the south that Afghan officials say killed 30 to 80 civilians, including women and children. NATO said its initial investigation found 12 civilians killed.

The 32,000-strong NATO-led force took command of security operations in Afghanistan last month. The alliance has been battling resurgent Taliban militants in the south and east in the worst increase in violence since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion ousted the Taliban.

Although NATO has assumed control, the U.S. is leading a smaller coalition of a few thousand U.S. and other troops to focus on counterterrorism operations and the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

    NATO says 70 suspected insurgents killed, UT, 29.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-10-29-nato-afghanistan_x.htm

NATO says 55 suspected insurgents killed

Posted 10/29/2006 1:31 AM ET
AP
USA Today

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — NATO and Afghan troops battled a large group of insurgents who attacked a military base in southern Afghanistan Saturday, killing 55 suspected militants, the alliance said. A roadside blast killed one NATO soldier and wounded eight others.

The fighting in Uruzgan province came a day after an international human rights group criticized NATO-led troops in Afghanistan, saying their tactics increasingly endanger civilians and are turning the population against the Western alliance.

NATO's top commander apologized Saturday for civilian deaths caused by fighting between Taliban militants and NATO forces earlier in the week, but said insurgents endanger civilians by hiding among them.

"Sadly, in asymmetric warfare, when you're battling an insurgency, typically the insurgents do not play by the same rules that we would like to play by," U.S. Gen. James Jones said.

Some 100 to 150 militants attacked a military base north of Tarin Kowt in Uruzgan, NATO said. NATO-led and Afghan troops fought back with small arms fire, attack helicopters and airstrikes.

"Initial battle damage assessment indicates that up to 55 insurgents were killed," NATO said. One Afghan soldier was wounded.

On Sunday, a roadside blast killed one NATO soldier and wounded eight other troops in Uruzgan, the alliance said. Three civilians were wounded. The nationalities of the slain and wounded soldiers were not disclosed.

A purported statement by the Taliban leadership, meanwhile, said the hardline militia has ruled out talks with President Hamid Karzai's government as long as foreign troops remain in the country.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch complained Friday that NATO's recent operations have killed dozens of civilians, but it also criticized the Taliban and other insurgents for putting civilians at risk "by using populated areas to launch attacks on NATO and Afghan government forces."

"While NATO forces try to minimize harm to civilians, they obviously are not doing enough," said Sam Zarifi, the group's Asia research director. "NATO's tactics are increasingly endangering the civilians they are supposed to be protecting and turning the local population against them."

He spoke on the same day that the International Red Cross urged all sides in the Afghan conflict to spare civilians.

Jones, the NATO commander, expressed regret for civilian deaths but said Taliban fighters use civilians as human shields and said that in the heat of battle it can be difficult to separate the two.

The death of a civilian "is something that causes anybody in uniform to lose a lot of sleep," Jones said at a news conference at Bagram, the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan.

His comments came four days after clashes between NATO-led troops and insurgents in the south that Afghan officials say killed 30 to 80 civilians, including women and children. NATO said its initial investigation found 12 civilians killed.

The 32,000-strong NATO-led force took command of security operations in Afghanistan last month. The alliance has been battling resurgent Taliban militants in the south and east in the worst upsurge of violence since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion ousted the Taliban.

A Taliban statement e-mailed to the Associated Press by purported militia spokesman Muhammad Hanif dismissed Karzai's offer for talks Friday and called his administration a "puppet government." Hanif's exact ties to Taliban leaders are unclear, and it was not possible to verify the statement's authenticity.

"We say even today that there is no possibility of any talks when the country is under occupation," it said. "Any talks with aggressors would amount to selling the country."

On Friday, Karzai reiterated to reporters that he was ready to negotiate with Mullah Omar if the fugitive stops receiving support from neighboring Pakistan. Karzai says Omar is hiding in the Pakistani city of Quetta, while Pakistan says he is in Afghanistan.

Over the past two years, hundreds of Taliban supporters, including some senior officials, have reconciled with Karzai's government, but there is no indication that high-level talks with the rebel leadership have occurred.

Karzai made a similar offer in an interview with AP last January, telling Omar to "get in touch" if he wanted to talk peace, but fighting has since escalated sharply.

Human Rights Watch argued that NATO is relying too much on aircraft to attack insurgent positions. In June, the U.S. Central Command reported 340 airstrikes in Afghanistan, double the 160 strikes in Iraq in the same month, the group noted.

Maj. Luke Knittig, the spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, said that "airpower is used extensively because it is an advantage and it can be decisive at a close fight."

But, he added, "its careful application is mandatory."

    NATO says 55 suspected insurgents killed, UT, 29.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-10-29-nato-afghanistan_x.htm

NATO kills 48 suspected insurgents in Afghanistan

Updated 10/25/2006 3:39 PM ET
AP
USA Today

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — NATO-led troops backed by artillery and airstrikes battled insurgents in southern Afghanistan, killing 48 suspected militants in three separate confrontations, the alliance said Wednesday.

At least four civilians were wounded in the clashes in Kandahar's Zhari and Panjwayi districts on Tuesday, the alliance said, adding that they were being treated ent at military medical facilities.

The clashes had targeted militants who were attacking NATO's development efforts in the area, said Maj. Luke Knittig, a spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force.

NATO-led troops used mortar, artillery and air support in the rolling clashes with insurgents, the alliance said.

NATO forces launched a major military operation in the Panjwayi area in September. The alliance said it killed more than 500 suspected militants during that offensive.

NATO-led troops and Afghan police, meanwhile, seized 10 tons of marijuana from a truck that was stopped in southern Afghanistan on a road linking the southern city of Kandahar with Kabul, the alliance said. Four people in the truck were detained.

Marijuana is illegal in Afghanistan, but officials here concentrate more on the fight against the opium trade.

In the country's west, U.S. and Afghan troops recovered more than 120 pounds of opium from a car in Farah province, another NATO statement said Tuesday.

The U.S. soldiers were supporting an Afghan National Army checkpoint when a car failed to stop, the statement said. An Afghan soldier noticed a suspicious bag where the spare tire was supposed to be and alerted the next checkpoint. A search of the vehicle netted the opium. The car's driver and passenger were detained.

Afghanistan's world-leading opium cultivation rose 59% this year, according to U.N. figures released last month.

The record crop yielded 6,100 tons of opium, or enough to make 610 tons of heroin — outstripping the demand of the world's heroin users by a third, according to U.N. figures.

According to the U.N.'s Office on Drugs and Crime, some 2.9 million people were involved in growing opium, representing 12.5% of the total Afghan population, and that revenue from this year's harvest was predicted to hit over $3 billion.

Opium cultivation has surged since the ouster of the Taliban in late 2001. The former regime had enforced an effective ban on poppy growing by threatening to jail farmers — virtually eradicating the crop in 2000.

But Afghan and Western counter-narcotics officials say Taliban-led militants are now implicated in the drug trade, encouraging poppy cultivation and using the proceeds to help fund their insurgency.

The U.N. anti-drug chief also urged the government to crack down on big traffickers and remove corrupt officials and police officers fueling the trade.

    NATO kills 48 suspected insurgents in Afghanistan, UT, 25.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-10-25-afghan-drugs_x.htm

In the Land of the Taliban

October 22, 2006
The New York Times
By ELIZABETH RUBIN

One afternoon this past summer, I shared a picnic of fresh mangos and plums with Abdul Baqi, an Afghan Taliban fighter in his 20’s fresh from the front in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. We spent hours on a grassy slope under the tall pines of Murree, a former colonial hill station that is now a popular resort just outside Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. All around us was a Pakistani rendition of Georges Seurat’s “Sunday on La Grande Jatte” — middle-class families setting up grills for barbecue, a girl and two boys chasing their errant cow with a stick, two men hunting fowl, boys flying a kite. Much of the time, Abdul Baqi was engrossed in the flight pattern of a Himalayan bird. It must have been a welcome distraction. He had just lost five friends fighting British troops and had seen many others killed or wounded by bombs as they sheltered inside a mosque.

He was now looking forward to taking a logic course at a madrasa, or religious school, near Peshawar during his holiday. Pakistan’s religious parties, he told me through an interpreter, would lodge him, as they did other Afghan Taliban fighters, and keep him safe. With us was Abdul Baqi’s mentor, Mullah Sadiq, a diabetic Helmandi who was shuttling between Pakistan and Afghanistan auditing Taliban finances and arranging logistics. He had just dispatched nine fighters to Afghanistan and had taken wounded men to a hospital in Islamabad. “I just tell the border guards that they were wounded in a tribal dispute and need treatment,” he told me.

And though Mullah Sadiq said they had lost many commanders in battles around Kandahar, he and Abdul Baqi appeared to be in good spirits, laughing and chatting loudly on a cellphone to Taliban friends in Pakistan and Afghanistan. After all, they never imagined that the Taliban would be back so soon or in such force or that they would be giving such trouble to the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai and some 40,000 NATO and U.S. troops in the country. For the first time since the fall of 2001, when the Taliban were overthrown, they were beginning to taste the possibility of victory.

As I traveled through Pakistan and particularly the Pashtun lands bordering Afghanistan, I felt as if I were moving through a Taliban spa for rehabilitation and inspiration. Since 2002, the American and Pakistani militaries have focused on North Waziristan and South Waziristan, two of the seven districts making up Pakistan’s semiautonomous tribal areas, which are between the North-West Frontier Province and, to the south, Baluchistan Province; in the days since the 9/11 attacks, some tribes there had sheltered members of Al Qaeda and spawned their own Taliban movement. Meanwhile, in the deserts of Baluchistan, whose capital, Quetta, is just a few hours’ drive from the Afghan city of Kandahar, the Afghan Taliban were openly reassembling themselves under Mullah Omar and his leadership council. Quetta had become a kind of free zone where strategies could be formed, funds picked up, interviews given and victories relished.

In June, I was in Quetta as the Taliban fighters celebrated an attack against Dad Mohammad Khan, an Afghan legislator locally known as Amir Dado. Until recently he was the intelligence chief of Helmand Province. He had worked closely with U.S. Special Forces and was despised by Abdul Baqi — and, to be frank, by most Afghans in the south. Mullah Razayar Nurzai (a nom de guerre), a commander of 300 Taliban fighters who frequently meets with the leadership council and Mullah Omar, took credit for the ambush. Because Pakistan’s intelligence services are fickle — sometimes supporting the Taliban, sometimes arresting its members — I had to meet Nurzai at night, down a dark lane in a village outside Quetta.

My guide was a Pakistani Pashtun sympathetic to the Taliban; we slipped into a courtyard and behind a curtain into a small room with mattresses and a gas lamp. In hobbled a rough, wild-looking graybeard with green eyes and a prosthetic limb fitted into a permanent 1980’s-era shoe. More than a quarter-century of warring had taken its toll on Nurzai’s 46-year-old body but not on his spirit. It was 10 at night, yet he was bounding with energy and bombast about his recent exploits in Kandahar and Helmand. A few days earlier, Nurzai and his men had attacked Amir Dado’s extended family. First, he told me, they shot dead his brother — a former district leader. Then the next day, as members of Dado’s family were driving to the site of the first attack, Nurzai’s men ambushed their convoy. Boys, cousins, uncles: all were killed. Dado himself was safe elsewhere. Nurzai was mildly disappointed and said that they had received bad information. He had no regrets about the killings, however. Abdul Baqi was also delighted by the attack. He would tell me that Dado used to burn rocket casings and pour the melted plastic onto the stomachs of onetime Taliban fighters he and his men had captured. Abdul Baqi also recalled that during the civil war that ended with the Taliban’s seizure of Kabul, Dado and his men had a checkpoint where they “grabbed young boys and robbed people.”

Mullah Omar and his followers formed the Taliban in 1994 to, among other things, bring some justice to Afghanistan and to expel predatory commanders like Dado. But in the early days of Karzai’s government, these regional warlords re-established themselves, with American financing, to fill the power vacuum that the coalition forces were unwilling to fill themselves. The warlords freely labeled their many enemies Al Qaeda or Taliban in order to push the Americans to eradicate them. Some of these men were indeed Taliban. Most, like Abdul Baqi, had accepted their loss of power, but they rejoined the Taliban as a result of harassment. Amir Dado’s own abuses had eventually led to his removal from the Helmand government at United Nations insistence. As one Western diplomat, who requested anonymity out of personal safety concerns, put it: “Amir Dado kept his own prison, authorized the use of serious torture, had very little respect for human life and made security worse.” Yet when I later met Amir Dado in Kabul, he pulled out a letter that an officer in the U.S. Special Forces had written requesting that the Afghan Ministry of Defense install him as Helmand’s police chief and claiming that in his absence “the quality of security in the Helmand Province has dramatically declined.”

One Place, Two Stories

I went to Afghanistan and Pakistan this summer to understand how and why the Taliban were making a comeback five years after American and Afghan forces drove them from power. What kind of experience would lead Afghans to reject what seemed to be an emerging democratic government? Had we missed something that made Taliban rule appealing? Were they the only opposition the aggrieved could turn to? Or, as many Afghans were saying, was this Pakistan up to its old tricks — cooperating with the Americans and Karzai while conspiring to bring back the Taliban, who had been valued “assets” before 9/11?

And why has the Bush administration’s message remained that Afghanistan is a success, Iraq a challenge? “In Afghanistan, the trajectory is a hopeful and promising one,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote on the op-ed page of The Washington Post earlier this month. Afghanistan’s rise from the ashes of the anti-Taliban war would mean that the Bush administration was prevailing in replacing terror with democracy and human rights.

Meanwhile, a counternarrative was emerging, and it belonged to the Taliban, or the A.C.M., as NATO officers call them — the Anti-Coalition Militia. In Kabul, Kandahar and Pakistan, I found their video discs and tapes in the markets. They invoke a nostalgia for the jihad against the Russians and inspire their viewers to rise up again. One begins with clattering Chinooks disgorging American soldiers into the desert. Then we see the new Afghan government onstage, focusing in on the Northern Alliance warlords — Abdul Rashid Dostum, Burhanuddin Rabbani, Karim Khalili, Muhammad Fahim, Ismail Khan, Abdul Sayyaf. It cuts to American soldiers doing push-ups and pinpointing targets on maps; next it shows bombs the size of bathtubs dropping from planes and missiles emblazoned with “Royal Navy” rocketing through the sky; then it moves to hospital beds and wounded children. Message: America and Britain brought back the warlords and bombed your children. In the next clip, there are metal cages under floodlights and men in orange jumpsuits, bowed and crouching. It cuts back to the wild eyes of John Walker Lindh and shows trucks hauling containers crammed with young Afghan and Pakistani prisoners — Taliban, hundreds of whom would suffocate to death in those containers, supposedly at the command of the warlord and current army chief of staff, General Dostum. Then back to American guards wheeling hunger-striking Guantánamo prisoners on gurneys. Interspliced are older images, a bit fuzzy, of young Afghan men, hands tied behind their backs, heads bowed, hauled off by Communist guards. The message: Foreigners have invaded our lands again; Americans, Russians — no difference.

During the period from 1994 to 2001, the Taliban were a cloistered clique with little interest in global affairs. Today they are far more sophisticated and outward-looking. “The Taliban of the 90’s were concerned with their district or province,” says Waheed Muzhda, a senior aide at the Supreme Court in Kabul, who before the Taliban fell worked in their Foreign Ministry. “Now they have links with other networks. Before, only two Internet connections existed — one was with Mullah Omar’s office and the other at the Foreign Ministry here in Kabul. Now they are connected to the world.” Though this is still very much an Afghan insurgency, fueled by complex local grievances and power struggles, the films sold in the markets of Pakistan and Afghanistan merge the Taliban story with that of the larger struggle of the Muslim umma, the global community of Islam: images of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Israelis dragging off young Palestinian men and throwing off Palestinian mothers clinging to their sons. Humiliation. Oppression. Followed by the same on Afghan soil: Northern Alliance fighters perching their guns atop the bodies of dead Taliban. In the Taliban story, Special Forces soldiers desecrate the bodies of Taliban fighters by burning them, the Koran is desecrated in Guantánamo toilets, the Prophet Muhammad is desecrated in Danish cartoons and finally an apostate, Abdul Rahman, the Afghan who was arrested earlier this year for converting to Christianity, desecrates Islam and is not only not punished but is released and flown off to Italy.

It is not at all clear that Afghans want the return of a Taliban government. But even sophisticated Kabulis told me that they are fed up with the corruption. And in the Pashtun regions, which make up about half the country, Afghans are fed up with five years of having their homes searched and the young men of their villages rounded up in the name of counterinsurgency. Earlier this month in Kabul, Gen. David Richards, the British commander of NATO’s Afghanistan force, imagined what Afghans are thinking: “They will say, ‘We do not want the Taliban, but then we would rather have that austere and unpleasant life that that might involve than another five years of fighting.”’ He estimated that if NATO didn’t succeed in bringing substantial economic development to Afghanistan soon, some 70 percent of Afghans would shift their loyalty to the Taliban.

Nation-Building, Again

In the middle of Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province, a metal sign tilts into the road advertising the New York English Language Center. It is a relic of the last American nation-building scheme. Half a century ago, this town, built at the confluence of the Arghandab and Helmand Rivers, was the headquarters for an ambitious dam project partly financed by the United States and contracted out to Morrison-Knudsen, an engineering company that helped build Cape Canaveral and the Golden Gate Bridge.

Lashkar Gah (literally, “the place of soldiers”) was to be a model American town. Irrigation from the project would create farms out of the desert. Today you can still see the suburban-style homes with gardens open to the streets, although the typical Afghan home is a fort with walls guarding the family’s privacy. Those modernizing dreams of America and Afghanistan were eventually defeated by nature, culture and the war to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan in the 1980’s. What remains is an intense nostalgia among the engineers, cooks and farmers of Lashkar Gah, who remember that time as one of employment and peace. Today, Lashkar Gah is home to a NATO base.

Down the road from the base stands a lovely new building erected by an N.G.O. for the local Ministry of Women’s Affairs. It is big, white and, on the day I visited, was empty except for three women getting ready to leave. “It’s so close to the foreigners, and the women are afraid of getting killed by car bombs,” the ministry’s deputy told me. She was a school headmistress and landowner, dressed elegantly in a lime-colored blouse falling below the knees and worn over matching trousers. She weighed the Taliban regime against this new one in terms of pragmatic choices, not terror or ideology. She said that she had just wrapped up the case of a girl who had been kidnapped and raped by Kandahari police officers, something that would not have happened under the Taliban. “Their security was outstanding,” she said.

Under the Taliban, she said, a poppy ban was enforced. “Now the governors tell the people, ‘Just cultivate a little bit,”’ she said. “So people take this opportunity and grow a lot.” The farmers lease land to grow poppies. The British and the police eradicate it. The farmer can’t pay back the landowner. “So instead of paying, he gives the landowner his daughter.”

A few weeks before I arrived in Helmand, John Walters, the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, told reporters that Afghan authorities were succeeding in reducing opium-poppy cultivation. Yet despite hundreds of millions of dollars being allocated by Congress to stop the trade, a United Nations report in September estimated that this year’s crop was breaking all records — 6,100 metric tons compared with 4,100 last year. When I visited Helmand, schools in Lashkar Gah were closed in part because teachers and students were busy harvesting the crop. A prosecutor from the Crimes Department laughed as he told me that his clerk, driver and bodyguard hadn’t made it to work. They were all harvesting. It requires a lot of workers, and you can earn $12 a day compared with the $2 you get for wheat. Hence the hundreds of young, poor Talibs from Pakistan’s madrasas who had flocked to earn that cash and who made easy converts for the coming jihad.

Walters had singled out Helmand for special praise. Yet just a short drive from the provincial capital, I was surrounded by poppy farmers — 12-year-old boys, 75-year-old men — hard at work, their hands caked in opium paste as they scooped figlike pulp off the bulbs into a sack tied around their waists. One little boy was dragging a long poppy stem attached to a car he had made out of bulbs. Haji Abdul, a 73-year-old Moses of a man, was the owner of the farm and one of those nostalgic for the heyday of the Helmand Valley project. He had worked with Americans for 15 years as a welder and manager. He was the first to bring electricity to his district. Now there was none.

“Why do you think people put mines out for the British and Italians doing eradication when they came here to save us?” He answered his own question: “Thousands of lands ready for harvest were destroyed. How difficult will it be for our people to tolerate that! You are taking the food of my children, cutting my feet and disabling me. With one bullet, I will kill you.” Fortunately he didn’t have to kill anyone. He had paid 2,000 afghanis per jerib (about a half acre) of land to the police, he told me, adding that they would then share the spoils with the district administrator and all the other Interior Ministry officials so that only a small percentage of the poppy would be eradicated.

When I asked Manan Farahi, the director of counterterrorism efforts for Karzai’s government, why the Taliban were so strong in Helmand, he said that Helmandis had, in fact, hated the Taliban because of Mullah Omar’s ban on poppy cultivation. “The elders were happy this government was coming and they could plant again,” Farahi told me. “But then the warlords came back and let their militias roam freely. They were settling old scores — killing people, stealing their opium. And because they belonged to the government, the people couldn’t look to the government for protection. And because they had the ear of the Americans, the people couldn’t look to the Americans. Into this need stepped the Taliban.” And this time the Taliban, far from suppressing the drug trade, agreed to protect it.

A Dealer’s Life

The Continental Guest House in Kandahar, with its lovely gardens, potted geraniums and Internet access in every room, was mostly empty when I arrived, a remnant of the city’s recently stalled economic resurgence.

To find out how the opium trade works and how it’s related to the Taliban’s rise, I spent the afternoon with an Afghan who told me his name was Razzaq. He is a medium-level smuggler in his late 20’s who learned his trade as a refugee in Iran. He was wearing a traditional Kandahari bejeweled skull cap, a dark blazer and a white shalwar kameez, a traditional outfit consisting of loose pants covered by a tunic. He moved and spoke with the confident ease of a well-protected man. “The whole country is in our services,” he told me, “all the way to Turkey.” This wasn’t bravado. From Mazar-i-Sharif, in northern Afghanistan, he brings opium in the form of a gooey paste, packaged in bricks. From Badakhshan in the northeast, he brings crystal — a sugary substance made from heroin. And from Jalalabad, in the east on the road to Peshawar, he brings pure heroin. All of this goes through Baramcha, an unmanned border town in Helmand near Pakistan. Sometimes he pays off the national soldiers to use their vehicles, he said. Sometimes the national policemen. Or he hides it well, and if there is a tough checkpoint, he calls ahead and pays them off. “The soldiers get 2,000 afghanis a month, and I give them 100,000,” he explained with an angelic smile. “So even if I had a human head in my car, they’d let me go.” It’s not hard to see why Razzaq is so successful. He has a certain charm and looks like the modest tailor he once was, not a man steeped in illegal business.

Razzaq’s smuggling career began in Zahedan, a remote and unruly Iranian town near the border with Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is filled with Afghan refugees who, like Razzaq and his family, fled after the Russian invasion in 1979. Razzaq apprenticed as a tailor under his father and eventually opened his own shop, which the Iranians promptly shut down. They said he had no right as a refugee to own a shop. He began painting buildings, but that, too, proved a bureaucratic challenge. He was paid in checks, and the bank refused to cash them without a bank account, which he could not get.

Razzaq was newly married with dreams of a good life for his family. So one day he took a chance. “I had gotten to know smugglers at my tailoring shop,” he told me over a meal of mutton and rice on the floor of my hotel room. “One of them was an old man, so no one ever suspected him. The smugglers asked me to go with him to Gerdi Jangel” — an Afghan refugee town in Pakistan — “and bring back 750 grams of heroin to Zahedan. The security searched us on the bus, but I’d hidden it in the heels of my shoes, and of course they didn’t search the old man. I was so happy when we made it back. I thought I was born for the first time into this world.”

So he took another chance and managed to fly to Tehran carrying four kilos in his bag. Each time he overcame another obstacle, he became more addicted to the easy cash. When the Iranian authorities imported sniffing dogs to catch heroin smugglers, Razzaq and his friends filled hypodermic needles with some heroin dissolved in water and sprayed the liquid on cars at the bus station that would be continuing on to Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz. “The dogs at the checkpoint went mad. They had to search 50 cars. They decided the dogs were defective and sent them back, and that saved us for a while.” Eventually, he said, they concocted a substance to conceal the heroin smell from the new pack of dogs.

After the fall of the Taliban, Razzaq moved back to Helmand, built a comfortable house and began supporting his extended family with his expanding trafficking business. Razzaq’s main challenge today is Iran. While the Americans have turned more or less a blind eye to the drug-trade spree of their warlord allies, Iran has steadily cranked up its drug war. (Some 3,000 Iranian lawmen have been killed in the last three decades battling traffickers.) To cross the desert borders, Razzaq moves in convoys of 18 S.U.V.’s. Some contain drugs. The rest are loaded with food supplies, antiaircraft guns, rocket launchers, antitank missiles and militiamen, often on loan from the Taliban. The fighters are Baluch from Iran and Afghanistan. The commanders are Afghans.

Razzaq’s run, as he described it, was a scene out of “Mad Max.” Three days were spent dodging and battling Iranian forces in the deserts around the earthquake-stricken city of Bam. Once they made it to Isfahan, however, in central Iran, they were home free. They released the militiamen, transferred the stuff to ordinary cars and drove to Tehran, where other smugglers picked up the drugs and passed them on to ethnic Turks in Tabriz. The Turks would bring them home, and from there they went to the markets of Europe.

Should he ever run into a problem in Afghanistan, he told me, “I simply make a phone call. And my voice is known to ministers, of course. They are in my network. Every network has a big man supporting them in the government.” The Interior Ministry’s director of counternarcotics in Kabul had told me the same thing. Anyway, if the smugglers have problems on the ground, they say, they just pay the Taliban to destroy the enemy commanders.

Razzaq has at times contemplated getting out of the smuggling trade, he said, but the easy money is too alluring. Depending on the market, he can earn from $1,500 to $7,500 a month. Most Afghans can’t make that in a year. Besides, he said, “all the governors are doing this, so why shouldn’t we?”

Losers Become Winners

In December 2001, not long after the Taliban were routed, I visited the Shah Wali Kot district, several hours’ drive on unpaved roads from Kandahar, a Mordor land of rock mountains shaped like sagging crescents and mud-baked houses melting into the dunes. The Taliban leaders had fled, mostly to Pakistan. Gul Agha Shirzai, formerly a local warlord and soon-to-be new governor, and his soldiers had swarmed into power while the Americans set up their operations base in Mullah Omar’s Xanadu-like residence. I was with a large group of Populzai, the clan of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai.

We were in a big guest room with more than a dozen men gathered in a circle, all wearing the kind of turbans that look like gargantuan ice-cream swirls. The ones in black turban swirls were giggling, chatting and slapping one another on the back. The ones in white turban swirls were sulking, grumbling or mute. In this group, the miserable white turbans were Taliban men. They had just lost their pickup trucks, weapons, money, prestige and jobs, all of which had gone to the gleeful black turbans.

Today those miserable white turbans have taken to the mountains to fight. The gleeful black turbans are under siege. I saw one of the black turbans this summer, the Shah Wali Kot district leader, in the garden of the Kandahar governor’s palace. He was a mess. He chuckled loudly when I asked him how it was back in Shah Wali Kot. “Frankly, we are just defending ourselves from the Taliban,” he said. “Our head is on the pillow at night, but we do not sleep.”

That small division among the Populzai in Shah Wali Kot echoes the larger division of the Pashtun into two main branches: the Durrani and the Ghilzai. The Durrani, Karzai’s tribe, have dominated for the last two centuries in Afghanistan and regard themselves as the ruling elite. In the south, the Ghilzai were often treated as the nomadic, scrappy cousins. With the exception of Mullah Omar, who had been a poor Ghilzai farmer, the leaders of the Taliban tended to be Durrani. These days, the perception among the southern Ghilzai is that they are persecuted, that the jails are filled with their people, while the Durrani in the south received all the Japanese, U.S. and British contracts and jobs. From what I could gather during my weeks in Afghanistan, these perceptions were mostly true. But even if they were exaggerated, such perceptions, in an illiterate society, have a way of quickly morphing into reality.

Take Panjwai, a district just outside Kandahar, where hundreds of Taliban massed this summer, taking advantage of the changeover from American soldiers to a NATO force of Canadian troops. One afternoon I met a red-haired propagandist and writer for the Taliban in a Kandahar office building. With his slight lisp, chain-smoking habit and eclectic reading — French novelists and Arabic philosophers — he seemed more a tormented graduate student than the landless villager from Panjwai he was. Panjwai is a mishmash of tribes, and the Taliban were exploiting the grievances of the Nurzai, a tribe that has felt persecuted and unfairly targeted for poppy eradication. Traders in Kandahar, he said, were donating money to the Taliban. Landowners were paying them to fight off eradicators. The Taliban were paying poor, unemployed men to fight. And religious scholars were delivering the message that it was time for jihad because the Americans were no different from the Russians. Just a few weeks earlier, the Taliban went on a killing spree in Panjwai. They beheaded a tribal leader in his home, shot another in the bazaar and hanged a man near a shrine with a note tacked on his body: “SPY.”

The Taliban were feeling bold enough that one afternoon Mullah Ibrahim, a Taliban intelligence agent, dropped by my hotel for lunch. He was a Ghilzai, from Helmand, and told me he had tried to lead a normal life under the official amnesty program. Instead, he was locked up, beaten and so harassed by Helmandi intelligence and police officers that his tribal elders told him to leave for Pakistan and join the Taliban there. Then, about a year ago, he decided that he was tired of fighting and living as a fugitive and accepted a reconciliation offer from an Afghan general. Pakistani intelligence got wind of this and imprisoned him; upon his release, the Pakistanis gave him money and a motorbike and pressured him to go back to war. He is still tired of war, but the Pakistanis won’t let him live in peace, and now if he tries to reconcile with the Kabul government, he told me, the Taliban will kill him.

When fighting broke out on the main highway near Kandahar, I saw that the police had tied up a group of villagers — but the Taliban had all escaped. One of those village men, his hands bound behind his back, told me that he had peeped out from his house earlier that day and saw some 200 Taliban with new guns and rocket launchers. They wanted food and threatened him and other villagers. “But I am not afraid of them,” he said loudly. “I am only afraid of this government.” Why? “Look at what they do. They can’t get the Taliban, so they arrest us. We have no hope from them anymore. And when we call and tell them Taliban are here, no one comes.” As an engineer from Panjwai who had been an Afghan senator during the Communist era told me: “We are now like camels. In Islam, a camel can be slaughtered in two different ways.

“The Taliban are using rivalries and enmities between people to get soldiers, the same tactics as the mujahedeen used against the Russians,” the engineer continued. “Just like in Russian times they come and say, ‘We are defending the country from the infidels.’ They start asking for food. Then they ask the people for soldiers and say, ‘We will give you weapons.’ And that’s how it starts. And the emotions are rising in the people now. They are saying, ‘Kaffirs have invaded our land.”’

Qayum Karzai, the president’s older brother and a legislator from Kandahar, seemed utterly depressed when I met him. “For the last four years, the Taliban were saying that the Americans will leave here,” he said. “We were stupid and didn’t believe it. Now they think it’s a victory that the Americans left.”

With the Americans on their way out and the NATO force not yet in control, the Kandahar Police were left on the front line: underfinanced, underequipped, untrained — and often stoned. Which is perhaps what made them so brave. One afternoon I ran into a group who said their friends had just been killed when a Talib posing as a policeman served them poisoned tea. A shaggy-haired officer in a black tunic was standing by his pickup, freshly ripped up by a barrage of bullets, and staring at my feet. “I envy your shoes,” he said, looking back at his own torn rubber sandals. “I envy your Toyota,” he said and laughed. And then looking at my pen and notebook, he said, “I envy you can read and write.” It’s not too late, I offered feebly, but he tapped his temple and shook his head. “It doesn’t work anymore,” he said. “I smoke hash. I smoke opium. I’m drinking because we’re always thinking and nervous.” He was 35. He had been fighting for 20 years. Four of his friends had been killed in the fighting the other night. He had to support children, a wife and parents on a salary of about $100 a month. And, he said, “we haven’t been paid in four months.” No wonder, then, that the population complained that the police were all thieves.

At Kandahar’s hospital I met a 17-year-old policeman (who had been with the police since he was 14) tending to his wounded friend. He was in a jovial mood, amazed he wasn’t dead. He said they had been given an order to cut the Taliban’s escape route. Instead they were ambushed by the Taliban, ran out of bullets and had no phones to call for backup. “We ran away,” he said with a nervous giggle. “The Taliban chased us, shouting: ‘Hey, sons of Bush! Where are you going? We want to kill you.”’

Last month, NATO forces struck back around Panjwai with artillery and aerial bombardments, killing an estimated 500 Taliban fighters and destroying homes and schools. But unless NATO can stay for years, create a trustworthy police force and spend the millions necessary to regenerate the district, the Taliban will be back.

Deciding to Fight

Inside the old city walls of Peshawar, Pakistan, a half-hour drive from the Afghan border, in a bazaar named after the storytellers who enthralled Central Asian gold and silk merchants with their tales of war and tragic love, sits the 17th-century Mohabat Khan Mosque. It is a place of cool, marble calm amid the dense market streets. Yousaf Qureshi is the prayer leader there and director of the Jamia Ashrafia, a Deobandi madrasa. He had recently announced a pledge by the jewelers’ association to pay $1 million to anyone who would kill a Danish cartoonist who caricatured the Prophet Muhammad. Qureshi himself offered $25,000 and a car. I found Qureshi seated on a cushion behind a low glass desk covered with papers and business cards — ambassadors, N.G.O. workers, Islamic scholars, mujahedeen commanders: he has conversed with them all. His office resembles an antiques shop, the walls displaying oversize prayer beads, knives inlaid with ivory and astrakhan caps. It was day’s end, and Qureshi was checking the proofs for his 51st book, called “The Benefits of Koran.”

Qureshi told me that he meets with Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, about twice a year. Qureshi understands Musharraf’s predicament: “The heart of this government is with the Taliban. The tongue is not.” He didn’t claim total insider knowledge, but he said, “I think they want a weak government and want to support the Taliban without letting them win.” Why? “We are asking Musharraf, ‘What are you doing,’ and he says: ‘I’m moving in both ways. I want to support the Taliban, but I can’t afford to displease America. I am caught between the devil and the deep sea.”’

Not long ago, Qureshi said, he received three emissaries from Mullah Omar who wanted Qureshi to warn another religious leader to stop preaching against the Taliban. “I refused,” he said. Later Sheikh Yassin, one of the messengers, was arrested by the I.S.I., Pakistan’s military intelligence service. So why, I asked, does Qureshi say the I.S.I. is supporting the Taliban? “That is the double policy of the government,” he replied. Even in the 1990’s, he said, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was supporting the official Afghan government of Burhanuddin Rabbani while the I.S.I. was supporting his opponent, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, as he rained thousands of rockets upon Rabbani’s government and the citizens of Kabul. Qureshi told me that if he and local traders didn’t want Al Qaeda or the Taliban to flourish, then they wouldn’t. “We are supporting them to give the Americans a tough time,” he said. “Leave Afghanistan, and the Taliban and foreign fighters will not give Karzai problems. All the administrators of madrasas know what our students are doing, but we won’t tell them not to fight in Afghanistan.”

The new Taliban fighters in Afghanistan are of three basic types. There are the old war-addicted jihadis who were left out of the 2001 Bonn conference, which determined the postwar shape of Afghan politics and the carve-up of the country. There are the “second generation” Afghan refugees: poor, educated in Pakistan’s madrasas and easily recruited by their elders. And then there are the young men who had jobs and prestige in the former Taliban regime and were unable to find a place for themselves in the new Afghanistan.

Coincidentally, there are also now three fronts. One is led by Mullah Omar’s council in Quetta. The second is led by Jalaluddin Haqqani, a hero of the jihad against the Soviets who joined the Taliban. Although well into his 80’s, he orchestrates insurgent attacks through his sons in Paktia, Khost and Paktika, the Afghan provinces close to Waziristan, where he is based. Finally, there is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the former leader of Hezb-i-Islami, the anti-Soviet fighters entrusted with the most money and arms by the U.S. and Pakistan. He had opposed the Taliban, living in uneasy exile in Iran until the U.S. persuaded Tehran to boot him out; he sneaked into the mountainous eastern borderlands. Since the early days of Karzai’s government, he has promised to organize Mullah Omar’s followers with his educated cadres and finance their jihad against Karzai and the American invaders. Old competitors are coming together in much the way the mujahedeen factions cooperated to fight the Russians. Hekmatyar adds a lethal ingredient to this stew: his ties and his followers extend all through Afghanistan, including the north and the west, where he is exploiting factional grievances that have nothing to do with the Pashtun discontent in the south.

An Afghan I met outside Peshawar — for his safety he asked me not to use his full name — was typical of the 20-something Talibs who had flourished under the Taliban regime. He was from Day Chopan, a mountainous region in Zabul Province, northeast of Kandahar. When the Northern Alliance and the Americans took Afghanistan, he escaped through the hills on an old smuggling route to the North-West Frontier Province.

It was familiar terrain. A.’s father had been a religious teacher who studied in Sami ul-Haq’s famous Haqqaniya madrasa near the Khyber Pass and preached jihad for Harakat, one of the southern mujahedeen parties whose members filled Mullah Omar’s ranks. Those old ties still bind and have provided a network for recruiting. A. grew up in madrasas in the tribal Pashtun lands of Waziristan, where he learned to fire guns as a child in the American-financed mujahedeen camps. As a teenage religious student in Wana, the capital of South Waziristan, he would go door to door collecting bread for his fellow Talibs. Behind one of those doors, he saw a girl and fell in love. When his father wouldn’t let him marry the girl, he threatened to go fight in Afghanistan. His father would not relent, and A. signed up at the local Taliban office in Peshawar. “We got good food, free service, everything was Islamic,” he told me. “It was the best life, rather than staying in that poor madrasa.” His father soon did relent, and A. became engaged, but he was only 15 and had no money. So he went back to the Taliban and was soon working beside the deputy defense minister. “Of course, then there were bags of money,” he said.

A., now 28, was living in an Afghan refugee village that used to belong to Hekmatyar’s group. Weak with malaria, he was nevertheless plump and jovial, even funny at times. Only when the Pakistani intelligence services came up did his already sallow hues pale to old bone.

After fleeing the American bombardment in 2001, he told me, the Taliban arrived in Pakistan tattered, dispersed and demoralized. But in the months after the collapse, senior Taliban leaders told their comrades to stay at home, keep in touch and wait for the call. Some Taliban told me that they actually waited to see if there was a chance to work with Karzai’s government.

“Our emir,” as A. referred to Mullah Omar, slowly contacted the commanders and told them to find out who was dead and who was alive. Those commanders appointed group commanders to collect the underlings like A. Weapons stashed away in Afghanistan’s mountains were excavated. Funds were raised through the wide and varied Islamic network — Karachi businessmen, Peshawar goldsmiths, Saudi oil men, Kuwaiti traders and jihadi sympathizers within the Pakistani military and intelligence ranks.

Mullah Omar named a 10-man leadership council, A. explained. Smaller councils were created for every province and district. Most of this was done from the safety of Pakistan, and in 2003 Mullah Omar dispatched Mullah Dadullah to the madrasas of Baluchistan and Karachi to gather the dispersed Talibs and find fresh recruits. Pakistani authorities were reportedly seen with him. Still, neither Musharraf nor his military men in Baluchistan did anything to arrest him.

It was a perfect job for Dadullah, whose reputation for bravery was matched by his savagery and his many war wounds, collected in more than 25 years of fighting. In 1998, his fighters slaughtered hundreds of Hazaras (Shiites of Mongol descent) in Bamiyan Province, an act so brutal it was even too much for Mullah Omar, who had him disarmed at the time. Dadullah’s very savagery, filmed and now often circulated on videotape, coupled with his promotional flair, were just the ingredients Omar needed to put the Taliban back on the map.

Today, Quetta has assumed the character of Peshawar in the 1980’s, a suspicious place of spies and counterspies and double agents. It is not just the hundreds of men in typical Afghan Pashtun clothing — the roughly wound turbans, dark shalwar kameez, eyes inked with kohl — who squat on Thursday afternoons outside the Kandahari mosque in the center of town, comparing notes on the latest fighting in Helmand or the best religious teachers. Rather, as I wandered the narrow alleyways of the Afghan neighborhoods, my local guides would say, “That’s where Mullah Dadullah was living” or “That’s where Mullah Amir Khan Haqqani is living.” (Haqqani is the Taliban’s governor in exile for Zabul Province.) Mullah Dadullah is now a folk hero for young Talibs like A. And all the Taliban I met told me that every time Dadullah gives another interview or appears on the battlefield, it serves as an instant injection of inspiration.

By 2004, A. said, he was meeting a lot of Arabs — Saudis, Iraqis, Palestinians — who taught the Afghans about I.E.D.’s (improvised explosive devices) and suicide bombings. “They taught us how to put explosives in plastic,” he told me. “They taught us wiring and triggers. The Arabs are the best instructors in that.” But now the Afghans are doing fine on their own. Pakistani jihadis in Afghanistan received their training, they told me, from Pakistani officers in Kashmir.

The southerners have also forged ties with the Pakistani Taliban in Waziristan. There is a free flow of arms and men between Waziristan and the Afghan provinces across the border. According to A., even Uzbeks from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan have joined some of the fighters now in A.’s home mountains in Day Chopan.

It was disheartening to hear A. describe his first encounter with Americans, who were trying to set up a base in a remote region of Zabul. Though they were building a road where no roads had gone before, he could perceive that asphalt only as a means for the Americans to transport their armored vehicles and occupy Muslim lands. A friend of his joined us as we were talking. He had just arrived in Pakistan from the Day Chopan region and said that the Americans were like a cyclone of evil, stealing their almonds and violating their Pashtunwali (the Pashtun tribal laws). In this instance, he meant the law by which even a cousin will not enter your house without knocking first.

A. is now a media man in Pakistan, coordinating the editing of films for discs, censoring them in case there are commanders who don’t want their faces seen and distributing them. He proudly offered me the latest disc of Mullah Dadullah beheading some “spies for the Americans.” He said he had sold 25,000 CD’s about the fighting in Waziristan.

He was full of contradictions. He said that if he didn’t have a house in Day Chopan, he would never spend a single night there because there was no education, no electricity, no power, nothing, just a heap of stones. Yet he did not want America to change all that. “We don’t like progress by Americans,” he declared. “We don’t like roads by Americans. We would rather walk on tired feet as long as we are walking in an Islamic state.”

Was it all just bravado speaking? Was an opportunity to build bridges to young men like A. somehow lost or just neglected? It was hard to tell. But when the I.S.I. subject came up again, his tone changed. “They are snakes,” he told me. He said that they were trying to create a new, obedient leader and oust the independent-minded Mullah Omar, and for that, the real Taliban hated them. Then he said: “I told you that we burn schools because they’re teaching Christianity, but actually most of the Taliban don’t like this burning of schools or destroying roads and bridges, because the Taliban, too, could use them. Those acts were being done under I.S.I. orders. They don’t want progress in Afghanistan.” An Indian engineer was beheaded in Zabul in April, he said, and that was also ordered by Pakistan, which, from fear of the influence of its enemy, India, was encouraging attacks on Indian companies. “People are not telling the story, because no one can trust anyone, and if I.S.I. knows I told you,” he said, he would be dead.

Pakistan’s Assets

There are many theories for why Pakistan might have wanted to help the Taliban reconstitute themselves. Afghan-Pakistani relations have always been fraught. One among the many disputes has to do with the Durand Line, the boundary drawn up by the British in 1893 partly to divide the Pashtun tribes, who were constantly revolting against the British. The Afghan government has never recognized this line, which winds its way from the Hindu Kush mountains of North-West Frontier Province 1,500 miles down to the deserts of Baluchistan, as its border. Nor have the Pashtun tribes. The Pakistanis may hope to force Karzai to recognize the Durand line in exchange for stability.

Another theory is that Musharraf must appease the religious parties whom he needs to extend his power past the end of his term next year. Musharraf bought them off, gave them control of the North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan and let them use the Taliban. And finally, the Pakistanis see Afghanistan as their rightful client. They want an accommodating regime, not Karzai, whose main backers are the U.S. and India, Pakistan’s nemesis.

Pakistan’s well-established secular Pashtun nationalist political leaders remain distraught that their lands have again become sanctuaries for the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani religious parties, which, since elections in 2002, rule these provinces and are completing a Talibanization of the region. The secular leaders point to another layer in Pakistan’s games: keeping the tribal areas autonomous enables Pakistan’s intelligence services to ward off the gaze of Westerners and keep their jihadis safely tucked away.

One thing you notice if you visit the homes of retired generals in Pakistan is that they live in a lavish fashion typical of South America’s dictatorship-era military elite. They control most of the country’s economy and real estate, and like President Musharraf, himself a former general, they do not want to relinquish power.

Although there is a secularist strain in the Pakistani military, it has been aligned with religious hard-liners since the army’s inception in 1947. Many officers still see their duty as defending the Muslim world, but their raison d’être has been undermined by the fact that though Pakistan was founded as a refuge for South Asia’s Muslims, more Muslims today live in India. They seem to envy the jihadis’ clarity. The militants had no identity crises. According to Najim Sethi, a prominent Pakistani journalist, military officers often have “a degree of self-disgust for selling themselves” to the Americans, and they still bear a grudge against the United States for abandoning them after the Afghan jihad and, more recently, for sanctioning Pakistan over its nuclear program. The standard army phrase about the Americans was, he said, “They used us like a condom.”

Officers spoke to me as if they were simply translating the feelings of the jihadis for a tone-deaf audience, but they sounded more like ventriloquists. One retired colonel I spoke to was a relative of a Taliban leader from Waziristan, Abdullah Massoud, who had earned both sympathy and reverence for his time in Guantánamo Bay. Massoud was captured fighting the Americans and the Northern Alliance and spent two years there, claiming to be a simple Afghan Talib. Upon his release, he made it home to Waziristan and resumed his war against the U.S. With his long hair, his prosthetic limb and impassioned speeches, he quickly became a charismatic inspiration to Waziristan’s youth.

Since 2001, some of Waziristan’s tribes have refused to hand over Qaeda members living among them. Under intense American pressure, Pakistan agreed for the first time in its history to invade the tribal areas. Hundreds of civilians and soldiers were killed. American helicopters were seen in the region, as were American spies. The militants (with some army accomplices) retaliated with two assassination attempts against Musharraf late in 2003. He struck back, but as the civilian casualties mounted and the military began to balk at killing Pakistanis, Musharraf agreed to a deal in the spring of 2004 whereby the militants would give up their guests in return for cash. Pakistani officers and the militants hugged and shed tears during a public reconciliation. But the militants did not relinquish their Al Qaeda guests, and they took advantage of the amnesty to execute tribal elders they said had helped the Pakistani military. The tribal structure in Waziristan was devastated, and the Taliban took to the streets to declare the Islamic emirate of Waziristan. Since Musharraf signed a truce with the militants last month, attacks launched from Waziristan into Afghanistan, according to NATO, have risen by 300 percent.

“Muslim governments are not able to face the Americans,” the retired colonel from Waziristan said, explaining the mujahedeen mind-set. “If Muslim governments should stand up against duplicity and foreign hegemonic designs, and they don’t, who will? Someone has to stand up to defend the Muslim countries, and it’s this that gives the jihadis the courage and zeal to stand up to the worst atrocities. This is the core issue of the mujahedeen movement. You call it the war on terror. The mujahedeen call it jihad.” And so, essentially, did he.

One afternoon, in the midst of a monsoon, I sought out one of the founders of the pro-jihadi strategy, the retired general Mirza Aslam Beg. He lived in Rawalpindi, the military capital half an hour from Islamabad, in a brick and tile-roofed mansion with a basketball hoop, flowing greenery and Judy, his one-eyed cocker spaniel. The house was immaculate, with marble floors, rugs, fine china and porcelain on display behind glass and an amusing portrait of Aslam Beg as a young, Ray-Banned, pommaded officer. His mansion sits across the street from Musharraf’s.

Aslam Beg played a leading role in the military’s creation of “asymmetrical assets,” jargon for the jihadis who have long been used by the military as proxies in Kashmir and Afghanistan. He was chief of the army staff from 1988 to 1991, while the Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan was selling the country’s nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea. Beg held talks with the Iranians about exchanging Iranian oil for Pakistani nuclear skill.

Aslam Beg likes to remind visitors that he was one of a group of army officers trained by the C.I.A. in the 1950’s as a “stay-behind organization” that would melt into the population if ever the Soviet Union overran Pakistan. Those brigadiers and lieutenant colonels then trained and directed the Afghan jihadis.

In the 1980’s, “the C.I.A. set up the largest support and administrative bases in Mohmand agency, Waziristan and Baluchistan,” Aslam Beg told me. “These were the logistics bases for eight long years, and you can imagine the relations that developed. And then Chechens, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Saudis developed family relations with the local people.” The Taliban, he said, fell back after 2001 to these baselines. “In 2003, when the U.S. attacked Iraq, a whole new dimension was added to the conflict. The foreign mujahedeen who’d fought in Afghanistan started moving back to Afghanistan and Iraq.” And the old Afghan jihadi leaders stopped by the mansion of their mentor, Aslam Beg, to tell him they were planning to wage war against the American occupiers.

As the rain outside turned to hail, banging against the windows, Aslam Beg ate some English sandwiches that had been wheeled in by a servant. “As a believer,” he went on, “I’ll tell you how I understand it. In the Holy Book there’s an injunction that the believer must reach out to defend the tyrannized. The words of God are, ‘What restrains you from fighting for those helpless men, women and children who due to their weakness are being brutalized and are calling you to free them from atrocities being perpetuated on them.’ This is a direct message, and it may not impact the hearts and minds of all believers. Maybe one in 10,000 will leave their home and go to the conflicts where Muslims are engaged in liberation movements, such as Chechnya, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kashmir. Now it’s a global deterrent force.”

The Authentic Jihad

The old city of Lahore, with its broad boulevards and banyan-tree canopies, remains the cultural and intellectual heart of Pakistan. It is home to a small elite of journalists, editors, authors, painters, artists and businessmen. Najam Sethi, editor in chief of The Friday Times, and his wife, Jugnu Mohsin, the publisher, are popular fixtures among this crowd. Like so many of Pakistan’s intellectuals, they have had their share of run-ins with government security agents. For pushing the bounds of press freedom, Sethi was dragged from his bedroom during Nawaz Sharif’s reign, beaten, gagged and detained without charge. Musharraf, in his new autobiography, claims that Nawaz Sharif wanted him to court-martial Sethi for treason, an act that seemed ludicrous to him, and he refused.

I met him one afternoon at the newspaper’s offices as he was preparing his weekly editorial. He is a tall, affable man with smiling eyes and large glasses. And he got right down to business, providing an analysis of why Pakistan had decided to bring its “assets” — by which he meant the Taliban and Kashmiri jihadis — off the shelf.

In the days following 9/11, when Musharraf gathered together major editors to tell them that he had no choice but to withdraw his support for the Taliban, Sethi raised the touchy issue of the other jihadis. He said that if Musharraf was abandoning the Taliban, he would have to abandon the sectarian jihadis (fighting the Shiites), the Kashmir jihadis, all of the jihadis, because they were all trained in mind by the same religious leaders and in body by the same Pakistani forces.

In January 2002, Musharraf gave an unusually long televised speech to the nation. He reminded the people that his campaign against extremism was initiated years before and not under American pressure. He vowed that Pakistan would no longer export jihadis to Kashmir, that he was again placing a ban on several jihadi organizations, that camps would be closed and that while the madrasas were mostly educating the poor, some were centers of extremist teaching and would be reformed. A month later, Musharraf was at the White House next to President Bush, who praised him for standing against terrorism.

Sethi characterized Pakistani authorities as believing that the U.S. in Iraq “will be a Vietnam.” He said: “Afghanistan will be neither here nor there. So we cannot wrap up our assets. We must protect them.” The I.S.I. realized it could help deliver Al Qaeda to the U.S. while keeping the Taliban and the jihadis on the back burner. At the same time, Musharraf’s moderate advisers were telling him that holding on to those assets would eventually boomerang. And soon enough, the assets began to come after Musharraf — while the people of Pakistan were turning against him for being pro-American. “So going after jihadis who were protecting the Taliban came to a halt,” Sethi said.

Meanwhile the landscape next door in Afghanistan was changing. The warlords were back in action. The drug economy was surging. By 2003 and 2004, Musharraf’s men were becoming hysterical about what they saw as a growing Indian presence in Afghanistan, particularly the Indian consulates in Kandahar and Jalalabad, the Pashtun strongholds that Pakistan considered its own turf. Karzai was doing business with Indians and Americans and was no longer a Pashtun whom Pakistanis would want to do business with.

As Sethi spoke, I recalled a meeting I had with one of Kandahar’s prominent tribal leaders. He recounted a visit from a former Pakistani general who had been active in the I.S.I. The general invited Kandahar’s leaders to lunch and warned them not to let the Indians put a consulate in Kandahar and to remember who their real benefactors were. Today there is a consulate there, and Indian films and music are sweeping through the Pashtun lands. What is more, many Pakistanis believe India is backing the Baluch insurgency in Pakistan’s far south, clouding the prospects for the new, Chinese-built port in Gwadar. The port is Pakistan’s single largest investment in its economic future and has been attacked by Baluch rebels.

In many ways, Pakistani policy is already looking beyond both Karzai and the Americans; they believe it is prudent to imagine a future with neither. That future will be shaped by the past: the past with India, the past with the Soviet Union, the past with America. For Pakistan’s hard-liners, at least, the obvious choice was to take their assets off the shelf and restart the jihad.

A Difficult Choice

On the wall outside the Eid Ga madrasa, in Kuchlak, a parched town near Quetta, Afghan students and teachers were debating the merits of jihad. One boy had just fled an American assault on Day Chopan in Zabul Province. He had never been to Pakistan before. He was frenzied, in shock. As a student from Kandahar led the others in dusk prayer, a young boy whispered to me, “I like America.” They were hardly a unified group. One young Helmandi told me, “We want our traditions of Islam and Sharia, not your democracy,” while another argued for peace. Then the Helmandi asked, with genuine confusion: “Why are Muslims being tortured everywhere in the world, and no one is there to stand up for them? But if you touch one Westerner, the sky is on your head?”

Most madrasas in Pakistan are run by the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, the religious-party alliance that has joined with Musharraf to keep the popular parties of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif from regaining power. The J.U.I. madrasas usually endorse jihad, although even here I met madrasa students who were against the war. They subscribed to a vision of jihad as a struggle for self-improvement and the improvement of society. Mawlawi Mohammadin, a cleric from Helmand, went so far as to tell me that these are the true roots of jihad, though he confessed that his is a lonely voice. He was afraid of everyone — Taliban, Pakistani intelligence, even his pupils. “If we start openly supporting Karzai, we could be killed by our own students,” he told me with nervous laughter. Only a month earlier, a Taliban official from Helmand who had reconciled with Karzai’s government was gunned down by assassins on a motorbike in Quetta.

Mohammadin said that it is now open season for jihad in Afghanistan under J.U.I. guidance. Government ministers were even attending funerals to praise Pakistani Pashtuns who had died fighting in Kandahar. He estimates that there are some 10,000 Taliban fighters in Baluchistan. Despite the intimidation, he says he feels that his mission is to steer his students away from war.

One of these was Mohamed Nader, who had just attended a cousin’s funeral and was wondering what it all meant. His cousin’s family was poor, and without their knowledge, he had gone to earn money first by harvesting poppies in Helmand and then by fighting for the Taliban. Finally he was killed. Among the biggest problems, Nader told me, was that the cohesion of the Afghan family has been shredded by decades of poverty and refugee life in Pakistan. In a typically strong Afghan family, young adults obey their parents, even asking for permission to go fight. But here, boys just run off.

Rahmatullah was one of those who had run off and returned. He was skinny and disheveled, having just faced heavy fighting in Kandahar. Though an Afghan, he had grown up in Baluchistan, near the border, in an area where he said 200 fighters were now living. The mullah at his madrasa told all the students that it was time for jihad. And the I.S.I. was paying cash. But his father was old and against the war; he pleaded with him to abandon fighting. So he sent Rahmatullah to his friend Mohammadin, hoping he might open another path for his son. Rahmatullah told me that he wasn’t sure yet which mullah he would listen to.

(Next week, Part 2: How U.S. and NATO forces have been battling the Taliban and fighting for hearts and minds.)

Elizabeth Rubin, a contributing writer for the magazine, has reported extensively about Afghanistan. Her last article from the region was about the October 2005 Afghan elections.

    In the Land of the Taliban, NYT, 22.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/magazine/22afghanistan.html?hp&ex=1161576000&en=d244bd415d6e5049&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Expecting U.S. Help, Sent to Guantánamo

October 15, 2006
The New York Times
By TIM GOLDEN

Abdul Rahim Al Ginco thought he was saved when the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and overthrew the Taliban regime.

Mr. Ginco, a college student living in the United Arab Emirates, had gone to Afghanistan in 2000 after running away from his strict Muslim father. He was soon imprisoned by the Taliban, and tortured by operatives of Al Qaeda until, he said, he falsely confessed to being a spy for Israel and the United States.

But rather than help Mr. Ginco return home, American soldiers detained him again. Nearly five years later, he remains in the United States military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — in part, it appears, on the strength of a propaganda videotape made by his torturers.

“This was a 22-year-old kid who was brutally tortured,” one of Mr. Ginco’s American lawyers, Stephen R. Sady, said. “And instead of being liberated, he has endured four and a half years of additional confinement.”

A bill signed into law by President Bush last December requires the Pentagon to determine if information being used to hold a detainee has been obtained by coercion and “the probative value (if any)” of such information. Another law passed by Congress last month would ban the use of statements made under torture from the military tribunals that are to be used to prosecute some Guantánamo detainees.

But that second law, which awaits the president’s signature, would also sweep away most federal court challenges to the detention of Guantánamo prisoners, including perhaps the one filed by American lawyers for Mr. Ginco, who is now 28.

A spokesman for the Department of Defense, Cmdr. Jeffrey D. Gordon of the Navy, said he could not discuss the specifics of the evidence against any particular detainee. And because part of the military’s case against Mr. Ginco remains classified, it is not possible to evaluate fully the grounds for his detention.

But partial transcripts from two review hearings for Mr. Ginco at Guantánamo and information filed by his lawyers last week in district court in Washington show that the military has repeatedly accused him of having volunteered his life as a Qaeda martyr — a claim that appears to be based on a videotape found in Afghanistan.

That tape was pulled from the rubble of a home used by Muhammad Atef, the reputed military chief of Al Qaeda, who was killed by an American air strike on his home near Kabul on Nov. 16, 2001. Mr. Ginco named Mr. Atef as one of the Qaeda and Taliban operatives who tortured him in early 2000, applying electric shocks to his ears and toes, nearly drowning him in a filthy water tank, depriving him of sleep and beating him on the soles of his feet.

In December 2001 and January 2002, several Western news reporters, including one for The New York Times, interviewed Mr. Ginco and four other foreign prisoners as the Northern Alliance took over the prison where they had been held in Kandahar. A reporter for The Times of London described Mr. Ginco and some of the others as “desperate to be interviewed by the F.B.I.”

On Jan. 17, however, John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, held a news conference to announce that five videotapes had been recovered from the ruins of Mr. Atef’s home showing several men who “may be trained and prepared to commit future suicide terrorist acts.” The first man shown in an excerpt from one of those tapes was Mr. Ginco, whom Mr. Ashcroft identified as Abd Al-Rahim.

Lawyers for Mr. Ginco, who was born to a Kurdish family in Syria, still have not viewed the complete tape from which Mr. Ashcroft showed a brief excerpt or heard its audio. But they said they believed it showed part of one of the propaganda videos made by the torturers who extracted Mr. Ginco’s confession. In a hearing at Guantánamo in November 2005, Mr. Ginco admitted to a military review panel that he appeared in the video but said, “It wasn’t my choice.”

The Taliban announced in May 2000 that Mr. Ginco had been arrested as a spy. Another videotape was then broadcast on an Arab television network, in which he looks pale, uneasy and underweight and confesses at length to having been a spy for the United States and Israel.

This interview with Mr. Ginco about his purported espionage was also published in a Taliban government magazine in July 2000. It quotes him as saying he was corrupted at college by an “evil acquaintance” who introduced him to a “computer game called PlayStation.” Later, he added, he was shown a pornographic computer disc and introduced to an American embassy official, whom he identified as “Shamoyel Anty,” an agent of “the Israeli intelligence agency.”

After the collapse of the Taliban, Mr. Ginco and the four other foreigners were taken for questioning to the makeshift American detention center in Kandahar. Initially, one of the men said, they were treated more as guests than as prisoners, and were given chocolates and extra blankets by the American soldiers.

His treatment suddenly became much harsher, his lawyers said, after he was recognized as one of the men depicted in a brief Time magazine article based on Mr. Ashcroft’s announcement about the videotapes.

Mr. Ginco and the four others were transferred to Guantánamo in May 2002. Two of the five, a Briton and a Russian, were released in 2004, and both have made sworn statements on Mr. Ginco’s behalf, his lawyer, Mr. Sady, said.

In other statements filed in federal court, members of Mr. Ginco’s family said he had run away from home after borrowing money for a camping trip from some of his college classmates. Mr. Ginco’s elder brother, with whom he was living, said the family considered such borrowing shameful, and that he threatened to tell their strict father about the episode.

Mr. Ginco said he had tried to arrange to travel to Europe or Canada but could not because his father had kept his passport. He said a former friend from college who worked at the Afghan Embassy in Dubai told him that he could be deported to Afghanistan if he went to the police and told them he was an undocumented Afghan, which he then did.

In Afghanistan, he quickly drew the suspicion of the Taliban. He was told to go fight against Northern Alliance forces, he said, and sent briefly to a Qaeda training camp. When he tried to leave, he said, he was imprisoned and tortured. At Guantánamo, he has told military officials that the mistreatment badly damaged his right arm and that he had spent much of his time there in a psychiatric ward.

Mr. Ginco’s lawyers, who are federal public defenders in Oregon, are contesting his detention on the grounds that he could not have fought against the United States after it declared a war on terrorism because he was being held by the Taliban as an American spy.

    Expecting U.S. Help, Sent to Guantánamo, NYT, 15.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/us/15gitmo.html

NATO: 78 suicide bombs launched in Afghanistan this year

Posted 10/8/2006 10:42 AM ET
AP
USA Today

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Taliban militants have launched 78 suicide attacks across Afghanistan this year, killing close to 200 people, NATO said Sunday.

Violence has increased sharply across Afghanistan the last several months, and the Taliban has acknowledged adopting the suicide bombings and remote-controlled attacks commonly used by insurgents in Iraq.

Seth Jones, an analyst for the U.S.-based RAND Corp., said there had been an "extraordinary change" in the lethality of attacks in Afghanistan in 2006, indicating that militants are using "more sophisticated" techniques.

"There have been more suicide attacks in Afghanistan in 2006 than in the entire history of the country combined," Jones said. "That is one reason that the fatality numbers are so large — the suicide attack."

NATO said 142 Afghan civilians, 40 Afghan security forces and 13 international troops have died in suicide attacks since January.

The military alliance also said it has detained 10 would-be suicide bombers, in addition to 17 would-be bombers that Afghanistan's intelligence agency last week said it has detained.

"Our capability to learn about who is bringing this death and destruction in the form of suicide bombs and roadside bombs grows every day," said Maj. Luke Knittig, a spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force.

Fighting in the south has subsided since hitting a peak in August and September, when Western forces had protracted battles with militants in the southern province of Kandahar, said NATO spokesman Mark Laity.

The U.S.-led coalition and Afghan forces, meanwhile, killed five suspected insurgents in a clash in eastern Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defense said. One suspected insurgent was detained following the gunfight Saturday in eastern Paktika province.

    NATO: 78 suicide bombs launched in Afghanistan this year, UT, 8.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-10-08-afghanistan-suicide_x.htm

48 Suspected Taliban Caught in Pakistan

October 7, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:55 a.m. ET
The New York Times

QUETTA, Pakistan (AP) -- Police acting on a tip raided several militant hide-outs in southwestern Pakistan and arrested 48 suspected Taliban who had arrived in small groups from Afghanistan, police said Saturday.

The arrests were made during the past 24 hours in Quetta, the capital of southwestern Baluchistan province, said Wazir Khan, the city police chief.

However, no important Taliban figures were among the detainees, he said. They were being questioned to determine the purpose of their presence in Pakistan.

''We arrested these suspected Taliban from different areas, and they had come to Pakistan from southern Afghanistan in recent months,'' Khan said, adding none of them had travel documents.

Khan gave no further details.

The arrests came a week after police raided a private hospital in Quetta and detained nine Taliban.

Pakistan was once a main supporter of Afghanistan's Taliban regime but switched sides after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

The U.S. and its allies invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 and ousted the Taliban.

But resurgent Taliban militants have stepped up their campaign against U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan this year. The country has seen the worst bout of violence since the regime was removed from power five years ago.

    48 Suspected Taliban Caught in Pakistan, NYT, 7.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Pakistan-Taliban-Arrests.html

Afghans Enjoy Freedom Despite Growing Fear

October 7, 2006
By REUTERS
Filed at 8:08 a.m. ET
The New York Times

KABUL (Reuters) - Five years after U.S. forces launched their offensive to oust Afghanistan's Taliban, Shakeela Jan says she is happy to have the freedom to work but that she travels to her job every day in fear.

U.S.-led forces routed the Taliban in weeks following the October 7, 2001 launch of Operation Enduring Freedom. But five years later, the hardline Islamists and their militant allies have mounted their most sustained campaign of violence.

Women were banned from working under the Taliban. Now, Jan works with a dozen other women in a Ministry of Communications call center.

``We're worried when we come to work. You can see how the situation is getting worse every day,'' said January

There have been 56 suicide attacks in Afghanistan so far this year compared with 17 the whole of last year. Dozens of people have been killed in blasts in Kabul over the past month.

``People have to have security where they live but there's no security. How can we work and enjoy working outside our homes?'' Jan asked.

About 40,000 foreign troops, half of them American, are in Afghanistan -- the most since 2001. Fighting is largely confined to the countryside in the south and east. But bombers have struck across the country.

The anniversary of the start of the U.S.-led offensive is not being marked in Afghanistan. Most people are not aware of it.

``The purpose of the American invasion of Afghanistan was to destroy al Qaeda, but they couldn't,'' said former policeman Abdul Mohib, when asked about the anniversary.

``Now we see al Qaeda is stronger than five years ago and people are suffering a lot because of their underground operations.''

Millions of refugees have returned since 2001 and millions of children are back in school. Hundreds of clinics and many hundreds of kilometres of roads have been built.

New shops and offices have gone up in Kabul but the power is still intermittent and many streets are in a dire condition. Many ordinary Afghans say their lives are no better.

``The only changes we can see since the U.S. invasion is the return of some refugees and the freedom,'' said student Ghulam Haider. ``We're happy about this but we still face a lot of challenges.''

Most Afghans say they want foreign troops to stay, at least until their own security forces can take over.

But some blame the foreigners.

``Since the Americans invaded Afghanistan there has been no change to the lives of ordinary Afghans, especially security,'' said Kabul resident Qayoom Khan.

``The cause of all the misery in this country is America.''

    Afghans Enjoy Freedom Despite Growing Fear, NYT, 7.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-afghan-anniversary.html

Rumsfeld cites progress in Afghanistan

Updated 10/7/2006 1:54 AM ET
AP
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that despite Afghanistan's rising opium production and violence in the south, "the trajectory is a hopeful and promising one" five years after the Taliban's fall.

Rumsfeld, in an opinion piece in Saturday's edition of The Washington Post, said Afghanistan's economy has tripled in five years, its forces have grown by 1,000 soldiers a month, the number of students in school has grown fivefold and 80% of the population has access to basic health care, up from 8%.

Ticking off more progress, he cited the building of 25 courthouses, a 70% jump in revenue and even Coca-Cola's opening of a $25 million bottling plant in Kabul.

"Building a new nation is never a straight, steady climb upward," he wrote. "Today can sometimes look worse than yesterday — or even two months ago. What matters is the overall trajectory."

Rumsfeld touched on only a few of the setbacks, including a surge in the drug production that the Taliban had almost wiped out five years earlier.

But the defense secretary glossed over other dangers: The Taliban has taken control large parts of the countryside, more than 3,000 people have been killed in rising violence this year, and militants have been assassinating political figures, burning down schools and creating havoc with roadside bombs.

    Rumsfeld cites progress in Afghanistan, UT, 7.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-10-07-afghan-rumsfeld_x.htm

NATO soldier killed by roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan

Posted 10/7/2006 5:01 AM ET
AP
USA Today

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A NATO soldier was killed in an attack by militants who exploded a roadside bomb and shot small arms fire at a military patrol in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, the fifth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan.

The attack in the volatile Panjwayi district of Kandahar province happened near a NATO base, the alliance said. One of the patrolling vehicles was damaged. Attack helicopters and an explosives disposal team were dispatched to the area.

NATO did not release the nationality of the dead soldier.

Southern Afghanistan has been the scene of increased fighting and attacks the last several months. Taliban militants have been stepping up the use of roadside and suicide bombs. NATO troops had massive clashes with militants in Panjwayi district last month, and NATO said more than 300 fighters were killed.

In the eastern province of Khost, meanwhile, a suicide car bomber targeted a U.S. patrol near the border with Pakistan, said provincial police chief Mohammed Ayub. He said there were no casualties but one vehicle was damaged. The U.S. military had no immediate information.

In Ghazni province, police said a regional Taliban commander — Mullah Abdul Rahim Sabauun — was killed by police on Thursday.

Sabauun and his bodyguard, who were riding on a motorbike, were killed by police in Gelan district, said police chief Mirhamid, who goes by only one name. Sabuun was reportedly a high-ranking politician during the Taliban's rule.

The U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan began Oct. 7, 2001, to oust the hardline Taliban regime for hosting Osama bin Laden. Western forces and Afghanistan's Northern Alliance quickly routed the Islamic regime.

But the militant fighters who once appeared down and out have returned with a vengeance, taking control of large swaths of countryside in the last year.

More than 3,000 people have been killed in rising violence this year, mostly militant fighters battling Western forces and their superior firepower. Suicide bombers are increasingly targeting ordinary Afghans and Western troops, and militants are assassinating key political figures, burning down schools and using roadside bombs to deadly effect.

Some 40,000 U.S. and NATO troops are now in Afghanistan, 2½ times the number three years ago.

Making matters worse, drug production that was virtually wiped out by the Taliban by 2001 has skyrocketed. Afghan farmers grew enough opium in 2005-06 to make 610 tons of heroin — more than all the world's addicts consume in a year.

    NATO soldier killed by roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan, UT, 7.10.2006, article sans adresse visible.

Taliban revived in southern Afghanistan

Posted 10/7/2006 7:50 AM ET
By Jim Krane, Associated Press
USA Today

KABUL, Afghanistan — A sweating man wanders into a crowd and blows himself up, leaving a dozen bodies lifeless on the street. A few blocks away, a car bomb pulverizes an armored Humvee, killing two U.S. soldiers and 14 civilians. The kind of anonymous insurgent violence that is convulsing Iraq has migrated 1,500 miles east to plague Afghanistan five years after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled the Taliban regime.

The prospect of a second downward spiral — though so far Afghanistan isn't nearly as violent as Iraq — has experts worried that Western militaries don't have an effective strategy for these irregular wars.

"One Iraq is bad enough," said Bruce Hoffman, a counterinsurgency expert at Georgetown University. "Given that our two main theaters of operations aren't going well, one has to question how well the U.S. understands counterinsurgency."

The reborn Taliban acknowledges that it has adopted the suicide bombings, beheadings and remote-controlled bombs of the Iraqi insurgent movement. Nearly 200 civilians have been killed in suicide attacks this year that look all too much like the wave of bombings sweeping Iraq.

"We're getting stronger in every province and in every district and every village," said Qari Mohammed Yusuf Ahmadi, who calls himself the Taliban's spokesman for southern Afghanistan. "We don't have helicopters and jet fighters. But we're giving America and its allies a tough time with roadside bombs, suicide attacks and ambushes. Our Muslim brothers in Iraq are using the same tactics."

Resemblances to Iraq don't stop there. Taliban public relations teams videotape attacks and post them online, an uncharacteristic venture into modern technology for a Muslim fundamentalist group that once banned cameras and computers.

The West's military strategy in Afghanistan also resembles that in Iraq.

Just as critics say Washington did not send enough troops to Iraq before the insurgency took root, analysts fault the U.S. for failing to press its advantage in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003 when the Taliban were all but vanquished.

Meanwhile, Afghan observers say the same harsh U.S. tactics, decried in Iraq for causing civilian casualties, have helped the Taliban recruit new fighters.

But unlike Iraq's insurgents, the Taliban has ready sanctuary and support just outside their battle zone, in the border areas of Pakistan.

"There will be no end to this insurgency until its sanctuaries and external support are addressed," said Christopher Alexander, the deputy head of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

The U.S. military estimates about 6,000 Taliban and other insurgent fighters operate in Afghanistan, many from bases in Pakistan. Yusuf Ahmadi — who spoke by satellite phone from an undisclosed location and whose exact ties to the militia's leadership are unclear — put the figure in the tens of thousands.

The Taliban comeback, while focused on the volatile south and east, has begun to hit Kabul. The mountain capital's tree-lined boulevards are now scarred, like the streets of Baghdad, by garlands of razor wire, towering blast walls and impromptu police checkpoints.

There's little indication that Iraqi insurgents are joining the fight in Afghanistan or giving the Taliban direct aid, although a few Arab and Chechen fighters mingle in Taliban ranks.

But even without much personal contact, the Taliban has learned from Iraq's insurgency. websites explain the insurgent's art: everything from concealed rocket launchers to roadside bomb-making.

"We're not saying they're getting direct support from Iraq," a U.S. military official in Afghanistan said on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the information. "They've evolved by adapting their tactics. They've seen the value of the suicide bomber in Iraq. For them, it's a very cheap and effective weapons system."

The U.S. and NATO military response in Afghanistan also has nuanced differences from Iraq. U.S. warplanes drop 10 times more bombs in Afghanistan than they do in Iraq, and a few U.S. and NATO troops live off base in village houses, a strategy rarely attempted in Iraq.

But most of the allied war efforts looks similar. In both places, troops cordon off villages and search homes. They employ billions of dollars in technology — things like signal jammers and mine-clearing vehicles — to find and disarm roadside bombs. They operate from bases nearly identical in appearance, with troops living in tin trailers barricaded by dirt-filled metal baskets.

The Afghan war is still far smaller, occupying just 40,000 allied troops — a quarter of those in Iraq — and suffering a fraction of the casualties. But for individual soldiers serving in mountainous Taliban lands like Zabul province, the dangers feel the same.

"I know Iraq grabs a lot of headlines. But there's still a war going on over here," said Lt. Col. Steve Jarrard, 46, of Johnson City, Tenn., based in the hard-bitten southern town of Qalat. "I really hope we're doing the right thing over here."

Right now, it's too early to tell the result of major U.S. and NATO offensives aimed at crushing the Taliban.

"In three to six months you'll see a noticeable effect," said NATO spokesman Maj. Luke Knittig. "But you're talking two to five years before seeing a defeat of the insurgency" in southern Afghanistan.

    Taliban revived in southern Afghanistan, UT, 7.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-10-07-taliban_x.htm

Uncertainty, violence darken Afghans' hope

Updated 10/5/2006 12:35 AM ET
USA Today
By Paul Wiseman

DOAB, Afghanistan — For the first time, the girls in this village were starting to learn — reading, writing, geography, history, math, science. They were starting to dream, too: Star student Roya Noori, 15, illiterate two years ago, wanted to become an architect. Harzoo Mohammedy, 14, planned to go to medical school. And Zuhal Noori, 12, saw herself at the controls of a commercial jet.

Then the learning stopped.

The new schoolhouse came under rocket fire last spring from the surrounding hills. Mysterious letters turned up at night, threatening to kill any girls who stayed in school and their principal.

The Afghan National Police, who were a five-minute drive away, did little, says Issa Noori, principal of the girls' school. Outgunned, they patrolled during the day and stayed safely inside their compound at night. Insurgents ruled the dark. The girls' school here in Wardak province closed in May and won't reopen until the government can guarantee the students' safety.

"This area is outside of government control," Noori says. "No one can protect us."

U.S.-led military forces launched Operation Enduring Freedom on Oct. 7, 2001, toppling the Taliban. Five years later, the situation is sobering. Rising insecurity threatens early accomplishments. From Kandahar in the south to Mazar-e-Sharif in the north, there is a growing sense that the democratically elected, U.S.-supported government of President Hamid Karzai and international forces can't shield ordinary citizens from insurgents and criminals.

"No one thinks the Taliban are going to roll into town next week and take over," says Paul Fishstein, director of the Kabul think tank Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit. "But there is a lot of anxiety about what the future will bring."

An insurgency, raging in the south and in eastern provinces along the Pakistan border, has begun to creep into provinces that had been considered secure: Wardak, Kunduz, Ghazni, Balk. In the past two weeks, suicide bombers have struck Herat, a center of Persian culture in western Afghanistan, and Kabul, seat of the Afghan government and headquarters of the NATO force deployed to Afghanistan to establish security.

A thriving opium industry has spread corruption and lawlessness across the country and provided cash to the Taliban.

The insurgents are often called — or call themselves — Taliban, which would make them some of the same Muslim fighters who set up a harsh Islamic state and ruled from 1996 until 2001. But "it's more complicated than just the government vs. the Taliban," Fishstein says. "You've got a toxic brew of factors and interests. You've got Talibs. You've got drug dealers. You've got smugglers and criminals. You have a people with a stake in chaos and in maintaining a weak state."

U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, says some of the fighting involves Afghan tribes, warring over local issues such as water rights. If one tribe calls itself pro-government, he says, its rival might declare itself pro-Taliban.

Rebuilding is difficult

Rebuilding Afghanistan was bound to be difficult. The country has been shattered by three decades of war. According to the CIA's 2006 estimates, the typical Afghan will be dead by age 44; more than 60% of Afghans can't read; nearly one in six Afghan babies die in infancy. Afghan laborers are lucky to find work for $2 or $3 a day, the World Bank says.

"If we were under the impression that all of a sudden, after 25 years of war, everything would be wonderful — no, we were fooling ourselves," says Hassina Sherjan, founder of Aid Afghanistan, which ran the Doab girls' school.

No mistake, there has been progress. Afghans elected a president two years ago and a parliament last year — a breakthrough in a country ruled for three decades by a succession of communist apparatchiks, plundering warlords and medieval Taliban mullahs.

The U.S. government has spent $3.7 billion on aid to Afghanistan, helping build or repair more than 1,000 schools, enroll more than 5.3 million students in school, vaccinate 4 million Afghans against polio and pave more than 600 miles of road. Fueled by foreign aid, the economy is booming. The Asian Development Bank predicts the Afghan economy to grow 12% this year after expanding 14% in 2005.

So why is the Taliban gaining strength and jeopardizing the gains of the past five years? The short answer: The U.S.-backed Karzai government's inability to establish its authority and credibility with ordinary Afghans "opened the door for the Taliban," Eikenberry says.

The lost time allowed the Taliban to regroup in neighboring Pakistan and prepare a comeback. The Karzai government is widely seen as corrupt, beholden to unpopular local warlords and out of touch with average Afghans.

"In many cases, it's not that the people support the Taliban; it's that they're alienated from the government," Fishstein says. "There's a perception that justice goes to the highest bidder." The Taliban, by contrast, is known for imposing impartial but Draconian justice in the areas they control.

Critics say the Karzai government hasn't rooted out entrenched warlords and officials enriching themselves in the drug trade.

"The government has the obligation to use the judicial system, infant as it is, to impose the rule of law and re-establish confidence in the central government," Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, told the U.S. House Committee on International Relations in September. "The 100 beds at the new maximum-security prison at Pul-i-Charki (near Kabul) should be filled up as soon as possible with major traffickers and corrupt officials."

'Have to be corrupt to survive'

At a checkpoint outside the eastern city of Jalalabad, police officers stop traffic and strut around with sticks and batons, banging on the hoods of cars and shouting at bewildered and frightened drivers. Occasionally, they let a vehicle continue on the road to Kabul.

No explanation is offered for why some get through and others don't. The unlucky travelers suspect that money is changing hands. "These are crazy people, corruption people," says Hafizullah Turab, 44, a Jalalabad writer and movie director who is stuck in traffic.

Police corruption is no mystery. Even police colonels earn only $85 a month (though pay raises are coming). "They have to be corrupt to survive," says police Gen. Ahmad Sani, chief of police in northern Afghanistan's Kunduz province. And police are often deployed far from their homes. By contrast, the Taliban pays recruits $12 a day and lets them fight where they live, says Samuel Chan, a researcher with the Center for Conflict and Peace Studies, a Kabul think tank.

The cops are outgunned, too. Criminal gangs and insurgents "are using rocket launchers and machine guns," says Wardak Gov. Abdul Jabbar Naeemi. "The police are using only Kalashnikovs, AK-47s. We don't have enough bullets."

Kunduz police chief Sani complains that his men drive around in dilapidated pickups. "Sometimes we have to tow them back because they are not working," he says. "The narco-traffickers are driving the latest Land Cruisers. We cannot keep up with them."

Some fault a half-hearted nation-building effort by the United States and the international community. According to the RAND Corp. think tank, international aid to Afghanistan amounts to $57 per person vs. $209 in Iraq. Troop levels also are low by international standards.

RAND reports that Afghanistan has just one Afghan or foreign soldier for every 1,000 people, compared with seven in Iraq, 19 in Bosnia and 20 in Kosovo.

RAND analyst Seth Jones estimated in the spring that Afghanistan needed another 80,000 troops (for a total of 200,000) to establish order. Last month, NATO failed to scrounge up 2,500 reinforcements it wanted to send to Afghanistan, though Poland came through with 1,000 troops.

The Afghan government and its international backers also have been losing the propaganda war to the Taliban.

"The Taliban make outrageous claims," says British Army Lt. Gen. David Richards, NATO commander in Afghanistan. "We need to be more dynamic in rebutting them. We have to make sure we're telling the truth, which takes longer."

Instead of talking about Western concepts such as democracy and the rule of law, the Taliban offers local villagers practical help — protecting farmers who grow opium poppies from the government's poppy-eradication program, for instance. "Just because people were glad to see the backs of the Taliban doesn't mean they want everything the West has to offer," Fishstein says.

In a paper written in May, Amrullah Saleh, head of Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security, describes a meeting between U.S. forces and villagers in Ghazni province. The U.S. delegation included a woman dressed in military fatigues — offensive to villagers who believe women should rarely venture outside the home and then only when covered head-to-toe in a burqa. Saleh suggested limiting contact between international forces and Afghan villagers to prevent inevitable cultural clashes.

Once a success story

An hour's drive west of Kabul, Wardak province should be a success story — and for a while, it was. Since the Taliban was overthrown, the province has undergone a dramatic makeover. Newly paved roads connect Wardak and its farmers to the markets in Kabul. New refrigeration plants keep their apples and potatoes from spoiling. A 50-bed provincial hospital has replaced one half its size. Girls in Doab and other Wardak villages were finally attending school.

The progress in Wardak is being chipped away by a strengthening insurgency and emboldened criminal gangs. Last month, gunmen kidnapped a Colombian aid worker and two Afghan employees of a French relief group in Wardak's Jalrez district. Human Rights Watch has reported attacks and threats on Wardak girls' schools, including the one in Doab.

"Their weapon is destruction and terror. Our weapon is education and development," says Sherjan of Aid Afghanistan. "If they attack one school, we should build three more."

Wardak is still safer than lawless Kandahar and Helmand in the south. Wardak's Gov. Naeemi says his province is secure. He dismisses the shadowy figures behind recent trouble as bandits. "They are calling themselves Taliban," he says. "They are robbers."

Regardless, the threatening "night letters" and rockets have had an effect. "Last year, this was the best province," principal Noori says. "Now, I can't defend myself from the insurgents. No one can in Afghanistan."

Noori, 45, wears tinted glasses and a scraggly salt-and-pepper beard. He tucks his unkempt hair under a black prayer cap. He tells his story in his home overlooking Doab, an ethnic Pashtun village of mud compounds and apple orchards. Inside, Noori serves a generous breakfast of fried eggs, fresh butter, flat bread and cups of green tea sweetened with heaping spoonfuls of sugar. A cow bellows outside. The smell of dung hangs over the village.

Noori, who was born and raised in Doab, became sympathetic to women's rights while he was in sixth grade. When his father taught him and his four sisters to read, the girls caught on faster.

"My sisters were smarter than me. But they just stayed at home, taking care of the animals and the house. I went to school (at Kabul University)," he says.

In the late '70s, he was imprisoned as an Islamic fundamentalist by Afghanistan's communist government. Released, he fled to Pakistan and worked with a Swedish aid group schooling Afghan refugees. He was hired as principal when Hassina Sherjan's Aid Afghanistan set up a girls' school in Doab two years ago. "Hassina's school was wonderful," he says. "She provided pens, paper, even clothing."

The school was popular with local people and soon had 300 students, including 100 who attended classes in three neighboring villages.

Things started to go wrong about 10 or 11 months ago, Noori says. Insurgents emerged in the Wardak countryside, issuing warnings against girls attending school. They attacked Turkish engineers paving the road that runs past Doab on the way to Logar province. Two of the engineers fled into the village, and Noori offered them refuge for several hours until the insurgents were gone.

Noori met with local clerics, convinced that some of them were working secretly with the insurgents. He explained that the school taught nothing offensive to Islam. "They couldn't argue with me. I'm a good Muslim," he says. The threat grew, however, and the school finally closed when the insurgents vowed to kill the students.

Noori believes that some of his neighbors were behind the intimidation. "The insurgents recruited some of the villagers," he says. "In Afghanistan, if you pay people, they'll do anything."

Human Rights Watch doubts that the Wardak insurgents belong to the Taliban. In a July report, the group notes that Wardak is a stronghold of the fundamentalist warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, now a member of Afghanistan's parliament.

Like many Afghans, Noori believes that Pakistan is supporting the insurgency in an effort to keep Afghanistan weak and malleable — an allegation the Pakistani government has repeatedly denied. "We have a very bad neighbor," he says. "The first step toward progress is schools. If you can destroy a country's schools, they can't do anything."

Harzoo Mohammedy, the student who dreams of becoming a doctor, says she and her fellow students were willing to brave the threats they faced. "We were scared, but all the girls wanted to keep going to school. We didn't care," she says.

Noori hopes the Doab school will reopen in a few months: "We'll wait until the government gets a little stronger, and we can defend ourselves." He shrugs off the threat to his own safety. "Sometimes we need to struggle for the right things," he says. "It is God's decision when we die."

    Uncertainty, violence darken Afghans' hope, UT, 5.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-10-04-afghan-violence-cover_x.htm

Kerry Chides Frist for Taliban Comments

October 4, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:57 p.m. ET
The New York Times

PELHAM, N.H. (AP) -- Democratic Sen. John Kerry ridiculed Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist for trying to clarify his comment on bringing ''people who call themselves Taliban'' into the Afghanistan government.

''They're not clarifying. He did another Terri Schiavo diagnosis from a one-hour tape,'' Kerry, the party's 2004 presidential nominee, said Wednesday of the Tennessee Republican.

On Monday, Frist said the war against Taliban guerrillas can never be won militarily and that he favored bringing ''people who call themselves Taliban'' into the government.

The remarks drew immediate criticism from Democrats. They argued Frist was waving the white flag of surrender to the Taliban, who harbored the al-Qaida organization blamed for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

A Frist spokeswoman later said the senator believes Afghan tribesmen at risk of being lost to the Taliban should be brought into the government, not Taliban fighters themselves.

Kerry, mentioned as a possible 2008 presidential candidate, was campaigning in New Hampshire for state Senate candidate Beth Roth. Frist also is considered a White House hopeful.

Frist, a former heart surgeon, took a leading role last year in the fight to get Schiavo's feeding tube reinserted. He later was criticized for relying on a video to question her doctors' diagnosis that Schiavo was in a permanent vegetative state.

Kerry said Frist's Taliban comments sound like claims by the Bush administration about progress being made in Iraq, despite differing reports from those directly involved. The Massachusetts senator said he requested a private briefing with CIA officials earlier this week.

''I will tell you their outlook was bleak. It was completely different from what the administration is saying publicly, and they told me that is what they are saying to the administration today,'' Kerry said.

He added: ''We need an administration that tells America the truth. We don't need a cut-and-run policy in Afghanistan where the real war on terror is and a stay-and-lose policy in Iraq.''

Frist's spokeswoman, Carolyn Weyforth, said Kerry has absolutely no room to accuse Frist of cutting and running.

''It is Senator Kerry and his colleagues who have voted again and again to tie our hands in the ongoing war on terror instead of giving us all tools necessary to fight a 'smarter, more effective war on terror,''' she said, echoing one of Kerry's frequent campaign promises.

    Kerry Chides Frist for Taliban Comments, NYT, 4.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Kerry-Frist.html

After Afghan Battle, a Harder Fight for Peace

October 3, 2006
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL

PASHMUL, Afghanistan — NATO forces scored one of their biggest victories here in ferocious fighting in September, flushing out an area of southern Afghanistan that had been swarming with Taliban insurgents. But almost immediately a new and more difficult battle began — for support of the local people.

Villagers trickling back to their homes broke into an argument over who was to blame for the heavy destruction, NATO or the Taliban.

“My house was bombarded and my grape store destroyed,” said Hajji Bilal Jan, 48, a farmer from the upper part of Pashmul. “The coalition forces are cruel, without reason. There were no Taliban in our house. Why did they bombard the house?”

Another man, Neamatullah, 45, who like many Afghans uses only one name, stopped to listen and then countered: “Why did you let the Taliban come to your village? You brought them to your village.”

The battle here, the biggest for the American-led forces in the country since March 2002, was a long-awaited success for NATO forces in a year in which the Taliban have revived with surprising strength.

But it also showed that fighting the insurgency was not just about winning the battle, but securing the peace. Pushing out the Taliban is one thing, NATO and Afghan commanders emphasize, and keeping them out another.

NATO officials estimate that the Taliban lost 500 fighters over all and say 136 have been captured, mostly as they tried to escape. Five Canadian soldiers died in the operation. But just afterward, four more were killed in a suicide bombing.

To help enlist the support of local villagers, military commanders and the governor of Kandahar Province have started handing out half a million dollars in humanitarian aid and have promised families more help with repairing the war’s damage.

“If the people cooperate with us, the Taliban can do nothing,” said Capt. Majid Khan, commander of a unit of the Afghan Army that took part in the fighting and is now based in Pashmul.

Most villagers here, who grow grapes and pomegranates in the rich soil along the Arghandab River valley, said they opposed the Taliban but had been powerless to stop the groups of armed men who moved into the area over recent months.

But among them were those who fed and sheltered the Taliban and possibly fought alongside them. The villagers said the leader of the Taliban group in this area, Abdul Khaleeq, was from Pashmul, and he had fighters from surrounding villages as well as outsiders.

“Most of the people are with the government,” Mr. Neamatullah said. “Just a few people get special benefits from the Taliban.”

“He knows everything about the Taliban,” he added, pointing out the man he had argued with, Mr. Jan.

“It was very good, the bombing,” Mr. Neamatullah said. “I am happy, because the Taliban must be finished off.”

The Taliban first moved into two densely populated farming districts in this area, Panjwai and Zhare, west of Kandahar, in May just as NATO forces, led by Brig. Gen. David Fraser of Canada, were taking over command from United States forces in the southern region of the country.

“The whole place was full of Taliban,” said Faizullah, 26, a farmer who was later wounded in the bombing of the nearby village of Zehdanan. “They did not stay more than two nights in one place. They were telling people to leave.”

In July and August the Taliban began building up their forces there in a clear bid to set up an area of control and threaten the city of Kandahar, the provincial capital, General Fraser said in an interview in his headquarters at the Kandahar air base.

“They put a lot of resources into this area, a lot of intellectual capital and psychological commitment,” he said. “This was a fight unlike the fight I’ve had with the Taliban for the last eight months.”

One of the Taliban leaders, Hajji Mullah Abdul Rauf, a former provincial governor, taunted the American military in an interview with Al Jazeera television in the Panjwai area in late August. “Where has the American power gone?” he said. “Why could they not capture the Taliban and mujahedeen in their caves?”

“It is Afghans who are helping us,” he said. “They give food, they give help and they have come out against this government. They do not want this government.”

But Mr. Neamatullah said he had challenged some of the Taliban fighters he came across. He met a group sitting under a mulberry tree, not far from his village, Char Kutsa, also near Pashmul, where women were washing clothes in a stream.

He said he had asked the men: “Why do you come here? Do you want the women to get bombed?” He said he did the same with another group the next day in the mosque of a neighboring village. “The Taliban’s special answer was always that ‘somebody ordered us to come here’ to this village,” he said.

Villagers said the Taliban were mostly Afghans, but from neighboring provinces and districts, as well as from Pakistan. The Taliban were well equipped with radios, satellite telephones and weapons, they said.

NATO and Afghan forces finally mounted a carefully planned operation, beginning on Sept. 2, after warning civilians to leave the area and dropping leaflets promising the Taliban safe passage out if they gave up their weapons.

The Taliban concentrated their fighters in several pockets on either side of the river — at Sperwan, Pashmul and Siah Jui — and NATO deployed forces from the south, north and east in a pincers movement.

More forces guarded the western and southern flanks to cut supply and escape routes. Canadian forces hit a mine on their first attempt to breach the river stronghold from the south into Pashmul and then suffered multiple casualties in an airstrike from an American A-10 attack jet.

The commander of United States forces in southern Afghanistan, Col. R. Stephen Williams, 46, from Anchorage, joined the battle four days later. He gathered Canadian, American and Afghan forces for an attack on Pashmul on Sept. 12.

After wearing the Taliban down for six days with rock music blaring across the river valley, and artillery fire and airstrikes wherever they spotted a concentration of fighters, they found a weak spot in the Taliban’s defenses.

Playing his favorite song, AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” to hide the sound of the armored vehicles, Colonel Williams took the Taliban by surprise, crossing the river and driving through the cornfields from the northeast.

The fighting was intense for a day and a half. The Taliban were dug in under ideal cover in vineyards, with deep irrigation channels and high mud-wall barns for drying grapes. “It was Normandy invasion tactics with bunker systems and trenches,” Colonel Williams said as he walked journalists through a battlefield tour.

“We found a lot of bunkers, with metal roofs and air holes with metal pipes running up for ventilation,” the colonel said, standing over one bunker that had been destroyed by his forces “They used the canals as trenches and then would pull back to the bunker.”

The village school, a cluster of white painted classrooms built with American aid money in the last four years, was destroyed by repeated air and artillery strikes. “The Taliban used this as a weapons cache and their command and control place,” the colonel said. “For some reason they kept coming back in here every time we bombed the place.”

In small mud buildings, his soldiers found a makeshift field hospital. “We found tons of bloodied rags, bandages, IV bags and needles,” he said. “We took away five to six garbage bags for examination.”

The Taliban pulled out in groups during the attack, leaving small numbers of men to delay the NATO advance. Colonel Williams calculated from battlefield reports that his force alone had killed 150 to 200 insurgents in 10 days of fighting, and only had four men wounded on their side. Seven to eight Taliban commanders were lost in the fighting, he said.

Although NATO and Taliban forces told villagers to leave before the fighting, some civilians were killed and wounded in the conflict. United Nations officials have gathered reports of at least 40 civilians killed. A government commission sent by President Hamid Karzai to investigate the fighting said that 53 civilians had been killed in the fighting and that it had caused an estimated $750,000 in damage.

Kandahar’s main hospital took in 24 wounded people from the Panjwai and Zhare districts from Sept. 3 to 18, as well as two girls wounded in the suicide bombing, which happened on Sept. 18.

Rahmatullah, 33, a farm laborer, lay in bed with two broken legs. He lost two nephews, ages 3 and 1, when their house in Zangabad was bombed. As family members were trying to save the children’s mother from the rubble, a NATO plane struck a second time, wounding more women and children, he said.

Despite their injuries and losses, there was little sympathy for the Taliban among the patients or other villagers interviewed. In Pashmul, a 19-year-old high school student, also named Neamatullah, and his brother Habibullah, 17, climbed the broken wall where the gate to their house was destroyed.

They gestured with shock at the devastation before them. A bomb had gouged out a 25-foot-deep crater in their yard, smashing the well and the main building of the house.

Asked whom he blamed for the damage, Neamatullah said the Taliban. “Before they came, there was no bombing,” he said.

Three Soldiers Killed in Fighting

KABUL, Afghanistan, Tuesday, Oct. 3 (Reuters) — Two American soldiers and an Afghan soldier were killed and three American soldiers were wounded in a clash in the eastern Afghan province of Kunar, Afghanistan’s American-led coalition force said on Tuesday.

“The soldiers were operating as part of a combat patrol that made contact with enemy extremists,” the United States military said of the clash, which occurred late Monday in the province’s Pech district.

    After Afghan Battle, a Harder Fight for Peace, NYT, 3.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/world/asia/03afghan.html