The United States-led hunt for the Taliban continues relentlessly in Afghanistan. Three years after invading, 18 000 soldiers wield a battery of hi-tech weapons; stealth aircraft crowd the skies; satellites spin overhead; and special forces creep across remote mountains in a billion-dollar mission.
Yet finding the insurgents is a far easier task in neighbouring Pakistan: you just stroll down to the shops.
A wide variety of militant merchandise is on sale along Kusi Street in Quetta, 60 miles south of the mountainous Afghan border. Posters of Osama bin Laden brandishing a Kalashnikov hang from doors. Stickers of Taliban clerics are plastered on the walls.
The Talib Speeches Centre sells a range of cassettes for 25p each. Crackly recordings contain speeches and poems calling young men to join the jihad or mourning its martyrs. Gory covers match the themes — crossed swords dripping with infidel blood, battlewagons loaded with black-turbaned fighters, and beatific images of bearded militants now detained in Guantánamo Bay.
The men sitting crosslegged behind the counter describe themselves as staunch Taliban supporters. ”We will not go home until there is an Islamic government in Afghanistan,” says the shop owner, Muhammad Gul.
Others go much further. ”I am a mujahid and I will fight to the end of my life,” quietly declares Yar Muhammad, a 22-year-old Talib who says he has just completed guerrilla operations in Afghanistan.
Moving to the privacy of a car, he describes the insurgent life — being trained to fire rockets and plant roadside bombs; conducting night-time attacks against Americans; then flitting across the leaky border under the nose of three armies. ”We change our clothes and take off the turban to disguise ourselves. Some Taliban even shave.”
Now Muhammad has come to Quetta to fire his fundamentalist fury in one of the city’s many madrasas, or Islamic schools. Later he will return to continue the battle. ”We are fighting for the will of God,” he says solemnly.
The Taliban’s failure to disrupt Afghanistan’s election on October 9, which was won by President Hamid Karzai, sparked a flurry of predictions that the Islamists’ demise was near. The US military suggested their troops were demoralised and their leaders divided. Reports of impending defections to the government side appeared in the press.
But now the tempo of violence is quickening again. In the past week two US soldiers and four Afghans, three of them aid workers, have died in attacks. Meanwhile, thousands of American soldiers are preparing raids on the Taliban’s winter sanctuaries. They hope to stave off the Taliban’s spring offensive which could endanger parliamentary elections scheduled for April.
The Taliban is once again proving a slippery foe, partly thanks to its easy refuge in Pakistan. As cities like Quetta offer a new home to the Taliban, officials at the old bases in Afghanistan are infuriated by the apparent ease with which they slip across the border.
The police chief in Kandahar, the former Taliban homeland about 190km north of Quetta, says Pakistani support is stalling efforts to crush the rebellion. ”Look, the top 10 Taliban leaders are still living in Pakistan. How is that possible without assistance?”
Mullah Naquib, a hardline religious leader and former Taliban commander in Kandahar, echoes the accusation. ”That Pakistan supports the Taliban is obvious. We do not trust their promises.”
Pakistan vehemently denies the charges. President Pervez Musharraf dropped his support for the Taliban in 2001, realigning his government with the US. Since then Musharraf has stood behind the new Afghan government and sent thousands of soldiers to the border in search of al-Qaeda militants and sympathetic locals.
Nevertheless, his officials argue that securing the long border is a near impossible task. Balochistan province, of which Quetta is capital, has just six million inhabitants but covers 44% of the country.
”The terrain is very favourable to the insurgents,” says Shoukat Haider Changezi, director general of the Levies, a rural police force. ”The state would need a phenomenal amount of resources to be effective.”
But Musharraf’s Taliban policy has murky edges, say diplomats in Islamabad. Some of Pakistan’s powerful Islamist radicals — a mix of clerics, army generals and spies — have retained their Taliban links. Mr Musharraf, mindful of potential upheaval, is careful not to crack down too heavily on them.
”There seems to be a twin-track policy, even if it sometimes moves in opposite directions,” one western official says.
That policy means that, at the least, officials turn a blind eye to Taliban in centres such as Quetta. ”This Taliban issue is very sensitive,” admits the city’s deputy police chief, Muhammad Riaz.
Quetta remains a centre of fundamentalist learning. Madrasas run by Jamiat Ulema-e-Islami, a radical Islamist party, helped incubate a generation of Talib fighters in the 1990s. Today the schools are still open and their leaders are unapologetic.
”Yes we support the Taliban morally … The holy Qur’an teaches that jihad is the responsibility of every Muslim,” says Maulana Noor Muhammad, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islami leader in Quetta, as he fingers his wooden prayer beads.
But he denies providing material support to the militants. ”How can we? We have no military hardware and no money,” he says, adding: ”The Taliban will never be defeated.”
Across the border in Singesar, the dusty village near Kandahar where the Taliban movement was born a decade ago, there is less certainty. Standing outside a ruined seminary where Mullah Mohammed Omar once taught, a grape farmer, Muhammad Ewaz, remembers the one-eyed leader as a ”good, religious man”.
”At least we had security then,” he says, recalling how the Taliban imposed discipline by hanging thieves from tank barrels.
In contrast, he says, the government-allied militia forces are untrustworthy. ”You see soldiers taking small boys to abuse them, engaging in dog fighting and smoking hashish. How can we trust them?”
The Taliban fled Singesar long ago, some across the border to Pakistan. But whether they are gone for good is impossible to know, Ewaz says. ”It depends on the new government,” he shrugs. ”For now, nobody knows.” – Guardian Unlimited Â