Author: Paul Haven, The Associated
Press
Publication: The Kansas City Star
Date: September 23, 2003
Intercepted phone calls show Taliban
commanders have been orchestrating deadly attacks here and in other parts
of Afghanistan from a safe haven across the border in Pakistan, a senior
Afghan intelligence official told The Associated Press.
The resurgent Taliban forces - who
were chased from Afghanistan two years ago by the U.S.-led war - are getting
protection from Islamic hardline politicians and rogue elements of Pakistani
security, Afghan and Western officials charge.
President Hamid Karzai, in a speech
Tuesday to the United Nations, said that from "cross-border militant infiltrations
to hateful teachings at places disguised as madrassas (Islamic religious
schools), terrorism continues to make inroads into the space of peace and
prosperity."
Ghazni province, southwest of Kabul,
has been on the front lines of the recent violence, and many residents
say the local government and security officials have been unable or unwilling
to end the insurgency.
Former Taliban walk the streets
of this hardscrabble town, hiding only behind a change of clothes. They
boldly tried to assassinate the police chief last week and have turned
the back roads into a gauntlet of fear for aid workers.
It was here in Ghazni province that
four workers for a Danish charity were executed by Taliban rebels on Sept.
8; here where three Red Crescent workers met a similar fate in August.
In Zabul province, 135 miles to the southwest, rebels battled for weeks
through the deep gorges and craggy mountain peaks against an onslaught
of American air power and more than 1,000 Afghan soldiers.
A Sept. 8 order for Taliban fighters
in Zabul to retreat during U.S. bombing came in a satellite phone call
from a commander in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan's southwestern Baluchistan
province, the senior Afghan official privy to sensitive intelligence told
AP on condition of anonymity.
A similar phone call was placed
to Quetta in March by Taliban fighters who had stopped a Red Cross vehicle
on a dusty road in Afghanistan's Helmand province. The voice on the other
end of the phone was a senior Taliban fugitive commander, Mullah Dadullah,
who gave the order to execute an El Salvadoran national, a survivor of
the attack, the intelligence official said in a weekend interview.
The brother of Baluchistan's health
minister was arrested this month for alleged Taliban ties and accused of
plotting to kill a relative of the governor of Afghanistan's southern Kandahar
province, which borders Baluchistan.
"We have this impression that Quetta
and surrounding areas are being used by hardcore Taliban forces," Afghan
Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali said in an interview in his Kabul office.
Zalmai Rassoul, Afghanistan's national
security adviser, told AP the insurgency is being directed almost entirely
from abroad - with Pakistani religious schools teaching jihad, and officials
failing to crack down.
"When the Taliban was first defeated,
they were on the run, but they have had time in Pakistan to get a rest
and reorganize themselves," he said. "And now they are being incited and
encouraged to come back."
Pakistani officials strongly deny
that the Taliban are receiving sanctuary in their territory.
"There is no truth to the allegations
that Taliban have bases in Quetta to harm the interests of President Hamid
Karzai's government," Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema said Tuesday. As head of
the Interior Ministry's crisis unit, Cheema is in charge of cooperating
with the United States in the war on terrorism.
Pakistan was a strong supporter
of the Taliban regime, but switched sides following the Sept. 11 attacks
and has become a key ally of the United States. Still, rogue elements of
the military and intelligence services are believed to have maintained
old allegiances.
The sharp rise in attacks comes
as the West scrambles to increase its commitment in the country, a change
of heart that analysts complain may be too-little-too-late after two years
of foot-dragging.
President Bush earlier this month
asked Congress for an additional $800 million for Afghan reconstruction,
and NATO last week began assessing whether to expand a 5,000-strong peacekeeping
mission beyond the capital, Kabul.
In Ghazni, Mohammed Chaos Aolya,
the director of the Red Crescent Society here, said police were slow to
react when he received an urgent phone call on Aug. 13 from a frantic worker
injured in the Taliban attack.
"They are all afraid to do anything,"
Aolya said. "The police didn't want to come with us to the area, so I myself
went and brought the dead bodies back and tended to the wounded."
Aolya said anybody familiar with
the province knows that "Taliban and al-Qaida walk around freely during
the day." He said Taliban supporters no longer wear the black turbans favored
by the religious militia during its rule, but don't otherwise do much to
hide.
He also blamed the United States
for not doing enough to eradicate the group.
"They have cut down the Taliban
but they have left the roots remaining, and now this plague is growing
back," he said, adding that nearly all shipments of blankets and food to
the region have been halted since the attack on his workers. "Ghazni is
a poor province. This is hurting every man, woman and child."
Officials' fears of taking on the
Taliban may be justified.
On Sept. 17, a remote-control bomb
went off as the provincial police chief, Mohammed Ismail Aziz, was returning
home from work. The bomb killed four people and shattered Aziz's car, but
he escaped with minor shrapnel injuries.
Over the weekend, the bearlike police
chief was interviewed by AP as he convalesced in a long room, receiving
good wishes from about 100 supporters seated on colorful pillows and Afghan
blankets.
"We have arrested several Taliban
and we knew that they have a big plan to assassinate high officials in
the province," Aziz said. "They have delivered letters at night threatening
people not to send their children to school, they burned down a school
and have burned down health clinics. They want to show that the security
situation is not good. They want to stop the reconstruction."
Afghan officials have called on
the United States to pressure Islamabad to crack down on the Taliban, much
as it has on al-Qaida fugitives on its territory.
"If you leave Afghanistan the way
it was it will slip back into chaos and again become a place of terrorism,"
said Jalali, the interior minister. "The cost of security in Afghanistan
is far less than the cost of insecurity, not only for Afghanistan, but
for America and for the world at large."
