Kandahar’s exiles

Western diplomats in both countries and Pakistani opposition figures say that Pakistani intelligence agencies — in particular the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence and Military Intelligence — have been supporting a Taliban restoration, motivated not only by Islamic fervour but also by a longstanding view that the jihadist movement allows them to assert greater influence on Pakistan’s vulnerable western flank.

More than two weeks of reporting along this frontier, including dozens of interviews with residents on each side of the porous border, leaves little doubt that Quetta is an important base for the Taliban, and found many signs that Pakistani authorities are encouraging the insurgents, if not sponsoring them.

The evidence is provided in fearful whispers, and it is anecdotal.

At Jamiya Islamiya, a religious school here in Quetta, Taliban sympathies are on flagrant display, and residents say students have gone with their teachers’ blessings to die in suicide bombings in Afghanistan.

Three families whose sons had died as suicide bombers in Afghanistan said they were afraid to talk about the deaths because of pressure from Pakistani intelligence agents. Local people say dozens of families have lost sons in Afghanistan as suicide bombers.

One former Taliban commander said in an interview that he had been jailed by Pakistani intelligence officials because he would not go to Afghanistan to fight. He said that, for Western and local consumption, his arrest had been billed as part of Pakistan’s crackdown on the Taliban in Pakistan. Former Taliban members who have refused to fight in Afghanistan have been arrested — or even mysteriously killed — after resisting pressure to re-enlist in the Taliban, Pakistani and Afghan tribal elders said.

“The Pakistanis are actively supporting the Taliban,” declared a Western diplomat in an interview in Kabul. He said he had seen an intelligence report of a recent meeting on the Afghan border between a senior Taliban commander and a retired colonel of the Pakistani ISI.

Pakistanis and Afghans interviewed on the frontier, frightened by the long reach of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, spoke only with assurances that they would not be named. Even then, they spoke cautiously. Pakistan has long seen jihadi movements like the Taliban as a counter to Indian and Russian influence next door in Afghanistan, the Western diplomat and other analysts said, and as a way to provide Pakistan with “strategic depth”, or a friendly buffer on its western border.

In Pashtunabad, a warren of high mud-brick walls and narrow lanes in Quetta, the links of the government, religious parties and Taliban commanders to a local madrasa are thinly hidden, said a local opposition party member who lives in the neighborhood.

Three students from the madrasa went to Afghanistan recently on suicide missions, he said. The family of one of the men admitted that he had blown himself up but denied that he had attended the school. The man’s brother suggested that he had been forced into the mission and that someone had recruited him for payment.

“Nowadays people are getting money from somewhere and they are killing other people’s children,” he said. “We are afraid of this government,” he said. His father said he feared the same people would try to take his other son and asked that no family names be used.

President Musharraf relies on the religious party Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam, or JUI, which dominates this province, Baluchistan, as an important partner in the provincial and national parliaments.

At a madrasa, called simply Jamiya Islamiya, on winding Hajji Ghabi Road, a board in the courtyard proudly declares “Long Live Mullah Omar,” in praise of the Taliban leader, and “Long Live Fazlur Rehman,” the leader of JUI.

Members of the provincial government and Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam are frequent visitors to the school, the local opposition party member said, asking that his name not be used because he feared Pakistan’s intelligence services. People on motorbikes with green government license plates visit at night, he said, as do luxurious sport utility vehicles with blackened windows, a favourite of Taliban commanders.

NATO officials and Western diplomats in Afghanistan have grown increasingly critical of Pakistan for allowing the Taliban leaders, commanders and soldiers to operate from their country, which has given an advantage to the insurgency in southern Afghanistan. In September, Gen. James L. Jones, then NATO’s supreme commander, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Quetta remained the headquarters of the Taliban movement.

Still, Pakistan has insisted that the Taliban leadership is not based in Quetta. “If there are Taliban in Quetta, they are few,” said Pakistan’s minister for information and broadcasting, Tariq Azim Khan. “You can count them on your fingers.”

American officials and Western diplomats noted that, when put under enough pressure, Pakistan had come through with flashes of cooperation. But that only seems to reinforce the view that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies are more in touch with what is going on in the Taliban insurgency than the government lets on publicly.

For instance, a senior Taliban leader, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Osmani, who operated on both sides of the border, was killed in an airstrike in Afghanistan on December 19, after Pakistan helped track him, an American official in Afghanistan said.

At the same time, a kind of dirty war is building between Afghan and Pakistani intelligence agencies. A senior Afghan intelligence official said one of its informers in Pakistan was recently killed and dumped in pieces in Peshawar, a border town. The Afghan intelligence service has also recently arrested two Afghan generals, one retired, who have been charged with spying for Pakistan, as well as a Pakistani suspected of being an intelligence agent.

President Musharraf has acknowledged that some retired Pakistani intelligence officials may still be involved in supporting their former protégés in the Taliban.

Hamid Gul, the former director general of Pakistani intelligence, remains a public and unapologetic supporter of the Taliban, visiting madrasas and speaking in support of jihad at graduation ceremonies.

Afghan intelligence officials recently produced a captured insurgent who said Gul facilitated his training and logistics through an office in the Pakistani town of Nowshera, in the North-West Frontier Province, west of the capital, Islamabad.

NATO and American officials in Afghanistan say there is also evidence of support from current midlevel Pakistani intelligence officials. Just how far up that support reaches remains in dispute.

At least five villages in Pishin, a district northwest of Quetta that stretches toward the Afghan border, lost sons in the recent fighting in Kandahar between the Taliban and NATO forces, opposition politicians said.

One village, Karbala, is a main center of support for the jihad, local people say. Unlike the other villages, which blend into the stark desertlike landscape with their mud-brick houses and compound walls, Karbala has lavish houses, mosques and madrasas, suggesting an unusual wealth.

–CARLOTTA GiLL