Afghan officials see Taliban resurgence

By Victoria Burnett, Globe Correspondent, 9/25/2003

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Nearly two years after a US-led invasion ousted the Taliban, insurgents from the fallen regime have returned in force and are now waging a military and political war against the pro-Western government and the aid workers who are helping the new administration, Afghan officials and Western diplomats say.

President Bush raised concerns about the resurgent Taliban when he met with Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, in New York yesterday, US aides said. A day earlier, senior US officials said, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan had complained to Bush that the Taliban are moving freely across the border from Pakistan into Afghanistan.

Musharraf told reporters later that his government is working hard to curtail Taliban activity on the Pakistani side of the border, in part through improved intelligence. He said the Taliban are not conventional enemies who can be confronted head on, but guerrillas hiding out in small groups.

But officials in Kabul, the Afghan capital, say that in the rugged lands that stretch south and east to the Pakistan border, Taliban guerrillas are staging targeted attacks and forming larger units than have been seen in more than a year. One key goal appears to be to cripple the reconstruction work in rural areas that could help build legitimacy for the new Afghan government.

"Their ultimate aim is to cause maximum havoc and reoccupy parts of Afghanistan," said a Western diplomat in Kabul, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

In one recent attack, Taliban gunmen rounded up five Afghan employees of the Danish Committee for Aid to Afghan Refugees, tied their hands behind their backs, and sprayed them with bullets, killing four and badly wounding one. The survivor said the masked attackers had warned: "You were warned about working for [aid groups]."

It is sometimes unclear who is behind the attacks, and the coalition describes all insurgents as "anticoalition forces." But government officials say their intelligence and anecdotal evidence from local residents indicate that many attacks involve men bearing the hallmarks of the Taliban, the Islamic extremist movement that allowed Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network to operate from training bases in Afghanistan before Sept. 11, 2001.

According to accounts given by the surviving Danish victim, the group of nine heavily armed men that stopped them on the road and ordered them out of the car included two who wore black turbans, which are typically worn by the Taliban, and who rode motorbikes. They looked on silently while the other masked gunmen tied their victims together in a line.

"The Taliban have had time to recruit, rearm, and regroup," said Nick Downie, security coordinator for the Afghanistan NGO Security Office, a nonprofit organization that provides security advice to aid groups here. "Some withdrew into their own communities, and some have been sleepers awaiting a wake-up call."

US forces invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, a month after the Sept. 11 attacks against the United States, and with help from the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance and other militias ousted the Taliban by December 2001. The United States and a broad coalition of nations have supported the government led by Karzai, which was ratified by an assembly of Afghan groups in July 2002.

A series of attacks on aid workers, security installations, and civilian targets that began in March has surged recently. There were 19 attacks on aid workers in August and 20 in July, compared with 13 in the six months between September and February, according to a report by Care International.

The insurgents have turned their attention to efforts to rebuild the road between Kabul and the southern city of Kandahar. The road project is sponsored by US Agency for International Development and has been billed as the spine of the country's physical reconstruction. In August, at least six guards working for US contractor Louis Berger, which is overseeing the reconstruction of the road, were killed in an attack on their camp. Several other workers are missing and presumed dead. Last week, four men were arrested in Ghazni and admitted to planning grenade attacks on construction workers on the road, according to Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali.

Aid groups say they have halted projects in some areas and are unable to start some new ones because of fear that the attacks in the area will swell.

Gorm Pedersen, the director in Afghanistan of the Danish Committee for Aid to Afghan Refugees, says the group had planned to build wells to help returning refugees this year in the southern provinces of Zabul and Uruzgan, but withdrew from the area after suspected Taliban gunmen killed Red Cross worker Ricardo Munguia, who was Swiss-Salvadoran, in March.

The group, known as Dacaar, then moved some of its operations to southern Ghazni Province, as well as Paktika and Kunar provinces.

After this month's killings, the group pulled out of Ghazni.

"That's the Taliban strategy -- to keep us away and create disaffection," Pedersen said, adding that the withdrawal from certain areas may also keep refugees, who count fresh water as a high priority, from returning.

Suspected Taliban forces are also carrying out more audacious attacks and clashing with the US-led coalition in larger numbers and in more sophisticated formations, security officials say.

Until recently, the coalition reported frequent rocket attacks against their bases, but said that very few were successful. Now, in addition to rocket attacks, there are frequent combat skirmishes between insurgents and coalition troops.

Three weeks after hundreds of suspected Taliban fighters fought coalition and progovernment forces in Dai Chupan, in the southern province of Zabul, in their biggest battle in 18 months, the two sides continue to clash almost daily in pockets in the south, in Kandahar, Zabul, and Paktika provinces.

The sheer number of fighters in Dai Chupan surprised Afghan and coalition officials. Zalmai Rassoul, the Afghan national security adviser, says he believes that the large numbers of Taliban were guarding "some key element" of Taliban or Al Qaeda. Hundreds of Taliban fighters had been gathering in the area for as long as two months and had set up a field hospital in a cave, Jalali said.

Afghan and Western officials in Kabul say that intelligence continues to point to the Taliban receiving support and shelter across the border in Pakistan and that the "hard-core" Taliban are operating from the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta. Pakistan has repeatedly denied offering any official backing of the Taliban and says it is doing everything possible to seal the border.

But Mullah Mohammed Khaksar -- the former deputy interior minister under the Taliban, who lives in Kabul and has no official post -- said that his contacts in Quetta see many of his former colleagues around town. Two Afghan government officials with access to top intelligence information said that the order to kill the Dacaar workers, received by satellite phone and intercepted, came from Quetta.

The order to withdraw troops from the Dai Chupan area also came via a call from Quetta, one of the officials said.

In New York, a senior US official told reporters that Bush and Musharraf had discussed what more could be done.

Taliban fighters also appear to be winning cooperation through intimidation. Aid groups and security officials tell of men being stopped at roadblocks and told to grow their beards and of Western audiocassettes being confiscated from cars. Gunmen in Khost last week reportedly threatened to disfigure those who failed to comply with the Taliban's strict interpretation of Islam. Western and Afghan officials say the group is also making political headway in the remote, ethnic Pashtun south, where disaffection with the central government runs high.

While the old guard of the Taliban is believed to direct the campaign in Afghanistan, there is a growing number of rank-and-file recruits, and they are being trained for holy war in the mosques and madrassas, or religious schools, in the border region, according to Khaksar and government officials.

"There is no doubt that the Islamist fundamentalists are supporting the Taliban and that madrassas are teaching people how to use weapons, how to make bombs," added Rassoul, the security adviser.