In northern Afghanistan, a small, stubborn Taliban

“Did you see that man? He is one of my people. He is maintaining security in this area,’’ said the commander, Mawlavi Hejran. “These gardens are our havens.’’

NATO this summer transferred to the Afghan government responsibility for securing Mazar-e Sharif, the northern city known as a bastion of relative calm. But just outside the city, in surrounding Balkh Province, the Taliban persists doggedly, exerting what some believe is a tightening grip on life in the area’s farmlands and villages. The situation is similar across much of northern Afghanistan, where the Taliban is not so much surging into new territory but stubbornly refusing to go away.

“The foreign troops think they can suppress the Taliban,’’ said Hejran, who claims to command 200 men, having inherited the reins last month when his brother was killed by a US airstrike. “But as long as the foreigners are here, the guerrilla war will continue.’’

The war in Balkh, far from the Taliban strongholds of Afghanistan’s south and east, offers an explanation for the intractability of this conflict. Insurgents here do not mass to fight the Afghan, US, or German troops in the region. Among the ethnic Tajiks and Hazaras who predominate here, the largely Pashtun Taliban has found little support.

But the insurgents evade and calculate, picking targets for assassinations and suicide bombings.

Outside the city, insurgents have posted directives in mosques, using Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan stationery, ordering residents to give them 10 percent of their crops. The insurgents make late-night house calls to enforce the demand. “They give you two or three days, then they beat you,’’ said one resident, who gave his share. Other fliers, bearing images of a sword, pistol, and noose, warn Afghans not to send their daughters to school.

“When the sun goes down, they don’t care about the government,’’ said the resident, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety. “They are ruling the districts and villages.’’

In recent months, Afghan forces working with US Special Operations troops have conducted night raids, capturing or killing at least 10 Taliban leaders in the province, according to a senior Afghan intelligence official. But Taliban members and Afghan officials agree that a core group of 300 to 400 insurgents, who retreat to Pakistan for training and winter refuge, still circulates in Balkh.

“If we didn’t do these operations, the enemy would definitely be trying more commando-style attacks,’’ said the intelligence official, who was not authorized to speak on the record. “But no matter how much pressure they’re under, how big their losses, they still fight.’’

Three Taliban members interviewed separately here offered consistent explanations for why they fight. They said they consider the Afghan government corrupt and rapacious. The US and NATO troops, they said, are occupiers waging a war against Islam. The three Taliban members are all Pashtuns, a minority group in Balkh, and they described feeling discriminated against by the locally powerful Tajiks.

“How can it be that the other ethnic groups are human but Pashtuns are not human?’’ asked Saleh Mohammad, who was secretary to the provincial governor during the Taliban’s 1996-2001 reign. He said that he stayed with the Taliban because he was imprisoned after the group was ousted and that Pashtuns have been excluded from the economic spoils by the current governor, Attah Mohammed Noor, a Tajik.

Mohammad described a vibrant underground support network for the insurgency in Balkh, with residents, including powerful businessmen, funneling money, motorcycles, weapons, and food to the fighters.

But he acknowledged the Taliban’s relative weakness in the north compared with other areas.

“The process of Talibanization is new in Balkh. We are at the stage of propaganda: inspiring people, inviting them to jihad, preaching in mosques,’’ he said. “Nowadays everyone is praying against the Americans.’’

The Taliban’s expanded use of assassinations as a tactic has exacted its most obvious toll in Kandahar Province - where President Hamid Karzai’s half brother and the mayor of Kandahar city were killed - but it has also destabilized the north. Noor, the Balkh governor, lives amid elaborate security. The top police official in the north, General Daud Daud, was killed this year in a bombing. The police chief of Kunduz was killed in March, five months after the province’s governor died in a mosque bombing.