Hiding In Plain Sight

By Tim McGirk/Kabul Muhib Habibi/Kandahar; Ghulam Hasnain/ Quetta; Rahimullah Yusufzai/Peshawar

Mullah Mujahed, a veteran Taliban commander who has taken four bullets in his career as an Islamic warrior, is in a surprisingly good mood for a guy sharing a Kabul jail cell with a hungry rat. A burly figure with black locks and a black beard, Mujahed prays in a corner, oblivious to the progress of the rat as it tunnels under a gray blanket toward a bag of dates. Rising from prayer, the devout Taliban says through the bars of the cell, "When I was on jihad, the holy Prophet Muhammad talked to me in my dreams."

Mujahed's Afghan and American interrogators are interested in other voices he heard during his time fighting U.S. forces, especially those voices that came from Pakistan. Mujahed was captured four months ago in the mountains of Afghanistan's Uruzgan province after an epic chase involving eight helicopters and dozens of troops. Afterward, Afghan intelligence found stored in his satellite telephone the numbers of several top Taliban military commanders, all hiding in Pakistan. His warden says Mujahed was caught with 60 remote-controlled bombs that he allegedly confessed to picking up in Pakistan after attending a Taliban war council in the southern city of Quetta.

In the Afghan theater of the war on terrorism, Pakistan--despite its close alliance with George W. Bush's Administration--is playing something of a double game. On the one hand, Islamabad has aggressively pursued al-Qaeda operatives since 9/11. It has arrested more than 600 suspects and handed most of them over to the U.S. Also, Pakistan has sent thousands of troops into the tribal areas to drive out al-Qaeda fighters hiding in the mountains along its Afghan border.

But President Pervez Musharraf's government has done little to capture the many Taliban commanders who have fled into hiding in the country, according to Afghan officials and Taliban fighters and sympathizers in the frontier Pakistani cities of Quetta and Peshawar. Those exiles include Mohammed Omar, the one-eyed mullah who formerly led the Taliban. Pakistan's reluctance, according to a senior Kabul official, stems from its "nostalgia" for when Afghanistan was firmly within its orbit of influence. Letting the Taliban remain free gives Pakistan a card to play if or when the U.S. decides to vacate Afghanistan. "If money and support were to stop from the Pakistani side, the Taliban would be finished," says Mullah "Rocketi," a former Taliban commander who earned his nickname for his accuracy in shooting Soviet tanks and who spent time at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Islamabad's reluctance to crack down has allowed Afghan fundamentalists to use Pakistan as a refuge from which to recruit fresh militants and launch cross-border ambushes against U.S. and Afghan troops. Some ex--Taliban fighters even allege that several colonels in Pakistan's security agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), are funding former Taliban proteges through madrasahs, or religious schools, and mosques in border villages. "The ISI knows where the Taliban live," Mujahed says. "They could arrest us all in a day. But they don't bother us."

His claims could be dismissed as an attempt to win favor with his Afghan jailers. Afghans often blame Pakistan for nearly every ill--a legacy of Islamabad's pre-9/11 support for the Taliban regime. But the prisoner's allegations are consistent with reports by Afghan and Western intelligence officials who contend that more than a dozen times in the past two years, they have alerted Pakistani authorities to the locations of specific Taliban hideouts, only to find that the extremists had slipped away before the raids started. (In response, Pakistani officials say the tip-offs were too sketchy.) "Right now," says a senior Afghan official, "we have solid evidence that Mullah Omar is hiding near Quetta." Two weeks ago, the elusive Taliban commander of the faithful issued his first message since July, renewing his call to fight Americans.

Other Taliban bosses are living openly in Pakistani cities, according to Afghan intelligence officials and several jailed jihadis. A captured seminary dropout, for example, claims he was recruited to carry bombs into Afghanistan by a senior Taliban living in Peshawar's swanky Hyatabad district. And an Afghan who works with the U.S. in Kandahar, Afghanistan, says the former Taliban Defense Minister, Mullah Obaidullah Akhund, openly celebrated his marriage to a teenage bride in Quetta several months ago. "We know the entire al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership is on the other side, and we can't do a damn thing about it," a U.S. commander complained to his officers on a recent tour of a firebase on the Afghan side of the border. He called in a mortar round that exploded only a few hundred yards short of a Pakistani border post--a warning that U.S. patience was being pushed to the limits.

America's impatience reaches all the way to the White House. At a New York City meeting in September of Bush, Musharraf and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Bush turned to Musharraf and ticked off the names of several Taliban chiefs that U.S. intelligence officials had told him were hiding in Pakistan, according to a member of the Afghan delegation. Musharraf, says the source, denied any knowledge of them. "If the U.S. has specific evidence that the Taliban are hiding here," says presidential spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan, "they should tell us, and we will act." Recently, Musharraf told reporters he was "exasperated" by claims that Taliban leaders were hiding in Pakistan.

But Bush's talk with Musharraf may be paying off. Taliban followers say ties are fraying with their militant sponsors--and through them, the ISI. Money for arms, explosives and fresh recruits is drying up. As a result, says a mid-level commander, Taliban are no longer able to mount effective hit-and-run missions inside eastern Afghanistan. In addition, last month's Afghan presidential election seems to have sapped Taliban strength. Despite the extremists' attempts to sabotage voting, Karzai was the overwhelming victor among Pashtuns, the ethnic group of most Taliban. A Taliban spokesman concedes that the U.S.-led security forces around polling sites made it impossible for militants to carry out their threats.

Lately there have been signs that many Taliban and their supporters may be losing their zeal for war. From his Kabul jail cell, Mujahed says he has had enough fighting. "Let others do the jihad," he says. "Me, I'm exhausted." If Pakistan really started to do all it could to crack down on the Taliban, it might find that fatigue among those battle-weary warriors would finish off the job. --With reporting by Muhib Habibi/Kandahar, Ghulam Hasnain/ Quetta and Rahimullah Yusufzai/Peshawar