Saturday November 15 2003 The Guardian Jason Burke
Stronger and more deadly, the terror of the Taliban is back
Close to Kandahar is a little village they call the cradle of the Taliban. Now, two years after the collapse of Mullah Omar's feared regime, the fundamentalist movement is once again on the march. In this disturbing report, Jason Burke in Sangesar tracks a resurgent menace
Sweeping the tail of his black turban over a shoulder, the young priest kneels in the dust and fiddles with the bare wires connecting an ancient amplifier to a car battery. Moments later, the call to noon prayer crackles out over the small village of Sangesar, birthplace of the Taliban.
A scatter of mud-walled houses amid dusty fields and brown-leaved plane trees 10 miles south-west of the city of Kandahar, Sangesar is indistinguishable from thousands of other such settlements scattered across the desiccated plains of south-eastern Afghanistan. It was here, nine years ago, that a one-eyed cleric named Mohammed Omar called together a few local men, told them to get their guns and led them out to end the anarchy that had gripped the region since the end of the war against the Soviet Union.
It was the core of the hardline Islamic militia movement that became known as the Taliban. Within two years, they had swept to power. Now it is 25-year-old Mullah Akhtar's turn to use Sangesar's only mosque's only microphone. 'The Taliban are good men trying to do good things for our country,' he says.
He is right to use the present tense. On the northern horizon, jagged hills are just visible. They are the stronghold of men loyal to Mullah Omar. Despite two years of effort by the US-led coalition, the cleric remains free. Indeed, he is more than just free. The hi-tech onslaught that followed the 11 September attacks in America appeared to have consigned the Taliban to the overfull dustbin of Afghan history. But in recent months they have crawled out again. The Taliban are back. And if for the moment they are confined to a few isolated, inaccessible, lawless mountain valleys, their power, military and political, is growing.
Last week the resurgent Taliban began striking into the cities and against heavily armed coalition troops. Their efforts were once limited to hit-and-run attacks on far-flung government outposts or aid projects and the assassination of moderate clerics. But in the past eight days they have attacked a column of armoured vehicles near the Pakistani border, killing a Romanian soldier, and detonated a series of bombs in Kandahar city itself and in Qalat, capital of Zabul province. The Taliban's leaders are also refusing to surrender a Turkish engineer who was kidnapped two weeks ago while working on the key road from Kabul to Kandahar. Instead, they issued threats to kidnap Western journalists.
The Taliban are expanding fast. The deputy governor of Zabul admits most of his province is now controlled by the militia. Most of Oruzgan province and around half of Kandahar province is now beyond government authority.
Even in supposedly loyal areas there are many loyal to Mullah Omar. In the Maiwand district of Kandahar province, Sher Ahmed Hakiya, the local chief, said: 'Many here were with the Taliban. Now they have all given me written pledges of their allegiance, so I am confident that there will be no problem.' Few are so optimistic.
The number of the new Taliban is unclear. A US-led operation in September, which claimed 300 'kills', seems to have had little impact. Some estimate that several thousand fighters have been mobilised in the Taliban-controlled areas.
But who are they? Are they supported by local people or by elements in neighbouring states? And how can President Hamid Karzai's fragile government rectify a situation which analysts agree is deteriorating fast?
The new Taliban can be split into four groups. There is the senior leadership who escaped the war of 2001 and are now largely based in Pakistan. Then there are the 'fighting' commanders inside Afghanistan. They too have often been involved with the Taliban for years. One of the most senior such men is the former Taliban Interior Minister, Abdul Razzaq, 35, who is operating in the hills visible on the horizon to the north of Sangesar.
The third category are Taliban 'fellow travellers', armed tribal bands led by those with their own reason for opposing the new central government. Significantly, an appeal issued last week by Mullah Omar was directed at warlords who have yet to side with either the Taliban or the government. The fourth and most numerous category comprises young foot-soldiers such as Abdullah, whom The Observer interviewed in prison in Kandahar.
Abdullah, 21, left his home in rural Helmand province this summer. He travelled to Quetta, the Pakistani city just across the border from Kandahar, to further his education. It was easy for him to slip across the virtually unguarded frontier. As the school in his village was in the mosque, it was natural for him to seek out a medressa, or Islamic school, in Quetta.
While there, he says, he was persuaded by a senior cleric to join the jihad in his homeland. By September, with a few thousand rupees from the mullah in his pocket, he headed back over the border into Afghanistan. With two others, he made his way to a rendezvous, met a group of Taliban and was issued with weapons. 'They had everything there,' he said. 'Satellite phones to talk to each other and to people in Pakistan. Guns. Ammunition. Everything.'
Other captured Taliban tell similar stories. Some say they became involved for the money offered by the clerics in Quetta. Others wanted to 'liberate' their homeland or fulfil their religious duty. Over iftaar, the dusk meal that breaks the fast of Ramadan, Yousuf Pashtun, the governor of Kandahar, said that three camps have been set up in Pakistan from where groups of up to 40 Taliban, many of them very young, are sent into Afghanistan to strike at coalition forces, government institutions and aid workers.
Pashtun says the Taliban are only '50 per cent to blame' for the problems: 'We must take half the blame. We have done nothing to deal with the root causes of the Taliban movement. It should be no surprise that they are back.'
The Taliban were always a cross-border phenomenon. The medressas now producing young Taliban - the name derives from the local word for 'student' - are all in Pakistan and funded by charitable donations from the Middle East. Offering a free education to poverty-stricken Afghans, they are extremely popular.
Thousands of such medressas, most of them run by clerics from the conservative Deobandi strand of Islam, have been established over recent decades and are factories of young radicals with views very different from the traditional moderate and tolerant Islam of most Afghans. A political party representing the Deobandi sect is part of a coalition of radical Islamic groups that now govern much of south-west Pakistan after winning elections last year on a surge of anti-Western, and anti-central government, feeling.
All this means that the Taliban have a safe haven and a steady flow of funds - two of the prerequisites for any successful guerrilla movement. A third requirement is local support. The Taliban and their opponents are aware of this.
In June, Mullah Omar set up a 10-man leadership council to co-ordinate a new strategy aimed at cutting south-eastern Afghanistan off from the rest of the country. Their aim, according to Western diplomats in Kabul, is to make the region too insecure for development work.
'If the Taliban can prevent the benefits of postwar reconstruction reaching local people, the disillusionment and alienation created will boost support,' one said.
So far, the strategy is working. International aid organisations are restricting their operations in the south-east. 'It's just too damned dangerous these days,' said one NGO security officer.
'Since this council was set up, the Taliban jihad has much improved,' Mullah Abdul Rauf, a Taliban official, said in a telephone interview. The result is an increasingly divided Afghanistan. In Kabul, aid money, private investment and a relatively secure environment have sparked a boom. Though many citizens remain destitute, the city is transformed. Under the Taliban, the streets were empty and shops boarded up. Banking facilities barely existed and there were almost no functioning telephones in the country. Now the bazaars are packed, traffic jams are common, mobile phones are everywhere and the money market turns over $10 million each week. The new currency is stable. 'It's so many times better,' said Ghaffour, a dealer at the market.
But the growth has yet to reach the south-east, the region which has been hardest hit by the recent droughts. The new Afghan constitution, though welcomed by most in Kabul, means little in this back country 300 miles from the capital. Much of the new economic activity in Kandahar is fuelled by the cultivation of the opium poppy - and next year's harvest is predicted to be the biggest ever.
'We have a lot of traffic on the roads now, which is good,' said the governor of Kandahar. 'It's a shame that one in 10 vehicles is carrying drugs.'
'There's a serious risk that this country will become a narco-state,' one senior ministerial aide told The Observer . In the south-east that has already happened, at least locally. The chief of one district begged The Observer to ask the government to send him a replacement for his police chief who, he said, was running 20 opium shops.
'Drugs people here are too powerful for me alone,' he said. Traffickers - keen to prevent Karzai's government from gaining enough strength to crack down on their business - are thought to be helping the Taliban.
Tackling the resurgent Taliban is a problem compounded by the ethnic complexities of Afghanistan. The Taliban are almost exclusively drawn from the country's majority Pashtun tribes, whose heartland is the south-east. Karzai, the President, is a Pashtun, but the government is dominated by Tajiks, a minority largely centred on Kabul and the north-east. The increasing alienation felt by Pashtuns makes them receptive to the Taliban's chauvinistic message.
The Taliban are also able to draw on the general anger of many Muslims at the course of 'the war on terror'. The Taliban used to be wary of Osama bin Laden and his brand of hardline internationalised militancy. Their project was limited to Afghanistan and they bore no ill-feeling to America or the West. Now they see themselves as a key element in the supposed struggle by Muslims against an aggressive 'Zionist-Crusader alliance'. 'Bin Laden is the greatest mujahid [holy warrior] and all Muslims think he is their ideal,' said Rauf, the Taliban official. 'All those fighting a jihad anywhere in the world against the cruel infidels are our brothers and allies.'
Such sentiments have yet to reach Sangesar - though time is running out. Mullah Akhtar said that bin Laden was 'a good Muslim, according to Islam', but expressed a fervent wish that the Saudi-born militant had launched his war against the West from somewhere other than Afghanistan.
Asked what they wanted most, his congregation discussed the question for some time before responding: 'A road, a clinic and a school.'
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