TIME: Encountering the
Taliban
Saturday, March 23, 2002
By MICHAEL WARE / KANDAHAR
General Tommy Franks, commander of the U.S. forces in
Afghanistan, calls the recent assault on Taliban and
al-Qaeda remnants in the Shah-i-Kot Valley an
"unqualified and absolute success." But he concedes
that pockets of resistance remain and promises to go
after them unceasingly. The British last week pledged
to help, committing 1,700 troops to the effort. Who
are these holdouts, and what are their aims? To find
out, TIME embarked on a search for surviving Taliban
fighters who refuse to yield. It required weeks of
negotiation with Taliban commanders, who finally
proffered an invitation to meet with two of them.
"They will talk," said an Afghan contact, "but not in
Afghanistan, somewhere safer."
The journey begins in Kandahar on a rainy weekday
morning. After a long drive, we reach a Pakistani
checkpoint. The 4x4 is discarded for motorbikes, on
which we travel along back paths across the border.
Once we get inside Pakistan, a car, indistinguishable
from the swarms of similar models around it, picks up
the travelers and cuts through the slow traffic of
the border bazaar. It proceeds along a back road to
the outskirts of town. "There are many Talibs here,"
says a guide. "Everyone knows, but everyone protects
them."
The car stops at a green iron gate at the mouth of an
anonymous compound. Once bona fides are established,
a man called Mullah Palawan steps outside a small
door and beckons his guests inside. "You are
welcome," he says, casting cautious eyes up and down.
In a long, high-ceilinged room where half a dozen men
rest on cushions, he is joined by another man, who
agrees to be identified only by his titles, Hajji
Mullah Sahib, meaning, roughly, Honorable Mr. Cleric
Sir.
These men are Taliban. Part of an unrepentant hard
core, they are hunted in their own country and
supposedly barred from Pakistan and denied access by
the hundreds of troops who guard the border. Yet here
they sit, sipping sweet green tea, untroubled,
gregarious and masters of their domain. Mullah
Palawan, who commanded an armored corps in Herat
before his flight to Pakistan, has spent the morning
browsing through the bazaar. Hajji Mullah Sahib, once
a Taliban ideologue and functionary in Kandahar,
passed the time at home chatting with friends and
neighbors. Both seem to go about their daily business
without a care in this bustling gateway to
Afghanistan.
Mullah Palawan is a large, jovial man. He tries to
keep his face stern but breaks out in cheeky smiles
when he thinks no one is looking. Hajji Mullah Sahib
is a drawn, rakish figure. Conversation stops when he
enters the room. In the past, his religious
scholarship lent authority to the Taliban. He and
others like him from the regime's theological
vanguard preached the righteousness of Mullah Omar's
government, and thousands listened. They still do in
the Pakistani madrasah, or religious school, where he
teaches today.
Hajji Mullah Sahib does not so much converse as
lecture. Afghanistan's woes, past and present, he
argues, are the fault of malign interference by the
Soviets and the Americans. Operation Enduring
Freedom, he says, is a pretense for manipulating
Afghan affairs. In a blink he dismisses the argument
that the U.S.-led coalition aims only to eradicate
al-Qaeda. "If the Arabs were terrorists, why didn't
America just catch them?" he asks, instead of
launching all-out war?
The men in this room, and others who are regrouping
in Afghanistan and Pakistan, boast that they are
preparing to pounce on the U.S. invaders, and that
they have allies. "Our neighbors are also terrified
of the United States, and they want to make trouble
for America," warns Hajji Mullah Sahib. "Now they are
sending us money, guns and men." On this score, he's
right. Iran has been sending supplies and munitions
to disgruntled Afghan commanders who are not being
paid by the new government. In Kandahar, the
Taliban's spiritual center, a government commander
says disaffected elements of Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence agency have been covertly
assisting al-Qaeda and Taliban fugitives with
logistics, escape and safe havens.
The anti-American forces, by various accounts, are
also finding support from a coalition of disparate
groups within Afghanistan. These include the
Iranian-backed Hezb-i-Islami movement, which before
the Taliban came to power was one of the most
dangerous factions among the Afghan mujahedin, and
Ittehad-i-Islami, which has a few thousand
underfunded troops in southern Afghanistan. These
groups once opposed the Taliban, but Afghan
intelligence sources confirm that the old disputes
have been sidelined in the face of a common enemy:
America and its Afghan allies. Astad Abdul Halim,
Ittehad-i-Islami's Kandahar commander, blasts the
province's U.S.-backed governor, Gul Agha Sherzai.
"If Sherzai continues the bad acts he is doing now,"
he says, "there will be a time very soon when we will
attack."
The recent Shah-i-Kot offensive, far from deterring
the opposition, has emboldened it. Applauded in the
West as a victory for the international coalition,
the operation has been celebrated by Kandahar Talibs
as an American failure. "How many bodies are there?"
asks a former Talib, mocking U.S. claims of a major
victory and citing eyewitness accounts of only a few
Taliban and al-Qaeda corpses. "With all their power,
the Americans could not capture our fighters," he
says.
If anyone doubts the ardor of grass-roots support for
the anti-American militancy in southern Afghanistan,
Kandahar's cemetery for al-Qaeda fighters bears
unequivocal testimony. Hundreds of mourners have
descended on the graveyard from as far away as
Mazar-i-Sharif, Kabul and Uruzgan province. What
began as daily homages have grown into all-night
vigils. Men, women and children sleep by the graves.
Devotees recite the Koran throughout the night. The
paralyzed, ill and blind flock to the site seeking
miracle cures, which many claim to receive. Men
mumble, repeating scripture until they fall into a
trance, swaying and convulsing, talking in tongues.
"Do not speak English here," says a Talib
accompanying a TIME correspondent. "They will kill
you the instant they know you are a foreigner. These
people are so angry."
In its propaganda from the underground, the Taliban
has subtly shifted tack, redrafting its cause from a
religious to a nationalist one. Hajji Mullah Sahib
makes sure he hits the buttons. "Those working
against America now are not Taliban," he insists.
"They are Afghan." Kandahar's bazaars reverberate
with claims that former Taliban Defense Minister
Mullah Obaidullah Akhund, who is thought to be in
hiding, has issued a secret call to arms. True or
not, the tale is meeting with approval in many
quarters. "For the moment, we need food and more
weapons, but we are willing to fight," says a former
Talib. "When America goes, we will take back Kandahar
in three days."
From his Pakistani hideout, Hajji Mullah Sahib claims
that former Taliban who have been absorbed into the
Kandahar government--and there are many--maintain the
rage. "They still do not want America in
Afghanistan," he says. "No one does. I can tell you
these commanders are working against America now and
always will." Murmurs of endorsement rise up from the
chorus of elders around him. "If all those with the
government were happy with America, how could anyone
be attacking the U.S. air base [in Kandahar] and
getting away with it with such impunity?" he asks,
referring to at least six probes of the airport's
defenses in the past three months.
Although the Kandahar government has made dramatic
announcements of Taliban surrenders, many of the
trumpeted capitulations have turned out later to have
been shams. In Baghran in the southwestern province
of Helmand, formidable Taliban General Abdul Wahid,
known as Rais the Baghran, was said to have given up
around Jan. 5. The next day, TIME met with the
resolute Wahid. Most of his arsenal and troops
remained intact. To this day he controls the
district. After surrendering to the Kandahar
governor, Jalalabad commander Mullah Salam Rakti
retreated to his home base in Qalat. A day later,
government soldiers sent to his residence found it
locked and abandoned. "He has gone into hiding with
his men," says a Qalat local. "Even his own village
doesn't know where he is." At one point the Taliban's
Herat police chief Mullah Abdul Samad and, later,
Mullah Obaidullah entered negotiations to turn
themselves in. "They were told by the governor that
they could go home, but then the Americans wanted to
take them, so they escaped again," Hajji Mullah Sahib
says. "So we have no intention of surrendering."
U.S. and British forces will spend the coming weeks
and months trying to pin down those with a similarly
recalcitrant view--if, that is, they can be found,
sifted from the supporters who hide them, feed them
and join their ranks. This fight is likely to be
patchy, frustrating and drawn out. "The world again
sent the firewood for fighting in Afghanistan," says
Hajji Mullah Sahib. "And sure enough it ignited. The
smoke of this fire will linger for a long
time."