Elderly Mohammed Nabi pounded his fist on the rug at his mudbrick house in south-west Pakistan and told how the Taliban recruited his cousin to avenge Nato bombings across the border.
“He didn’t say he was going for jihad, he said he was going to Afghanistan to visit our ancestral village about two months ago,” raged the white-bearded Afghan refugee who has lived in a dusty village near Quetta for 25 years.
“Then we got news a few weeks back that he had been martyred.”
A fighter who came back alive told Nabi that his younger cousin Ghulam Ahmed died in a major Nato offensive in southern Afghanistan’s Pashmul area in late October — after stepping on a landmine likely planted by the militants themselves.
Nabi said Ahmed left his home in a neighbouring village and crossed the porous desert border to fight after hearing about civilian deaths in other Nato bombings around the Taliban’s birthplace of Kandahar, where some members of the family still live.
The old man wiped his eyes and alleged his cousin was “under the control of his teachers” at a local Islamic school. “There is a local group of Afghans, they are backing the local people and sending recruiting people.”
He said he did not condone the actions of his cousin, who left a widow and children, but added: “If the West does not address the real problems and bombs a whole village to kill one Taliban you cannot expect there to be peace.”
His old friend Yar Khan spits tobacco into a copper pot and said that in their village alone five people have gone to Afghanistan this year to fight foreign soldiers. And, he said, another 40 have gone from nearby hamlets. About 20 have died.
“We know there is a group that collects youngsters and sometimes they tell their parents they are going to Quetta for a visit. Then suddenly they hear after a month or two months that they have been killed,” said Khan.
The pair ask that the name of their village not be revealed for fear of a visit from Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s spy agency which monitors the movements of all western visitors to Quetta.
Stories like these may bode ill for Islamabad as it comes under increasing pressure to help curb the violence in Afghanistan that is at its bloodiest since 2001. More than 3 500 people have died there this year so far.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has claimed that Taliban supremo Mullah Mohammad Omar is himself hiding in Quetta. A British army officer alleged in May that the insurgents’ leaders were based in the dustbowl city.
President Pervez Musharraf, who cut Pakistan’s links to the Taliban following the September 11 2001 attacks, strongly denies any official aid.
He says Pakistan shows its commitment through the 80 000 troops lining the 2 500km border with Afghanistan and military operations including an airstrike on a religious school in October that killed 80 suspected militants.
Most of those troops however are in the wild north-western tribal regions.
In dirt-poor south-western Baluchistan province, which borders the southern Afghan provinces where Nato faces the stiffest resistance, the job is largely down to police and paramilitary forces.
Baluchistan police chief Chaudhry Mohammed Yaqub defended Pakistan’s efforts, but argued that it is difficult when there are few or no immigration restrictions on who crosses what is the most porous section of the frontier.
“There is every possibility that amongst these 700 000 Afghan refugees in Baluchistan there are people who sympathise with the Taliban, but if somebody goes over the border legally we do not know who is going to fight,” he said.
He insisted there were no Taliban training facilities in Baluchistan and that no native Pakistanis were going over to fight, only Afghan refugees, of whom there are more than three million in Pakistan.
The police chief scoffed when asked if senior Taliban leaders had gone to ground in Quetta.
“It doesn’t make any sense” for Pakistan to shelter them when Islamic extremists have twice tried to kill Musharraf, he said.
Yaqoob too has been on the receiving end — a car bomb planted by an Afghan group blew out the windows of his office in November.
The police chief said his men have arrested and deported more than 150 Afghan Taliban in recent weeks in Quetta and its suburbs, including 47 suspects last week and others who were being treated in hospitals here.
Hardline religious groups however said the most recent batch of detainees were in fact students — a reminder of the international concerns about whether Pakistan’s 12 000 controversial Islamic schools, or madrasas, fuel militancy.
The party that runs most of this country’s madrassas, Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) is strong in Quetta. It openly offers its “moral support” to the Taliban, while denying that it actually funds or trains fighters.
“It is Muslims’ duty to support the Taliban, we are giving them political support and pray for them,” said Noor Mohammed, JUI patron-in-chief for Quetta and a former senior MP for Pakistan’s main alliance of Islamic parties.
“If somebody is able to go and practically take part in that fighting, he can do, and we praise them too,” added the bearded cleric, fingering jade prayer beads and sipping green tea in his backstreet office.
Mounting civilian deaths in Afghanistan and the presence of “infidel” Western troops justify the Taliban’s actions, he said. In the yard outside, party activists park their bikes and wipe their feet on a painted Stars and Stripes.
But he said it was impossible for his party to give the Taliban any military or financial support, as Pakistani security forces and “foreign intelligence personnel are hunting for Taliban people”.
“In this reign of terror nobody will even think of providing practical help for the Taliban,” he said.
He also saids it was “beyond imagination” that Pakistani authorities are backing the militia when they are “busy arresting anyone with a beard or a turban”.
But Musharraf raised eyebrows last month when he admitted that some retired ISI officials who worked with the Taliban in the 1990s may be helping the rebels.
Some local politicians voice suspicions that the government, the imams and the Taliban are still in league.
“The government is failing to stop infiltrators across the border because it is supporting them,” said Hasil Khan Bizanjo, secretary general of the secular National Party, which represents ethnic Pashtuns.
Mohammed Nabi, the grieving refugee, agreed. “I have just one message — I ask Pakistan to stop interfering in Afghanistan.” – AFP