TOP STORY
Bad news in AfghanistanTaliban regains control of much of country, Pakistan
Publishing Date: 18.04.06 21:18
Hamid MirThe Taliban is alive and well and thriving in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
One-eyed Mullah Omar and his army of radical Islamic students are presently in control of all of the rural and mountain areas of Afghanistan, including Khost, Paktia, Paktika, Ghazni, Zabul, Helmand, and Oruzgan, as well as a vast expanse of eastern and southern provinces including sections of Kandahar. They also have become the central governing body in South and North Qaziristan and other tribal territories of Pakistan.
That's the news from Hamid Mir, the only journalist to conduct face-to-face interviews with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in the wake of 9/11.
Mir, who has just completed an extensive tour of both countries, says that Pakistanis in government vehicles are no longer permitted to enter Waziristan, Baluchistan, and other tribal areas without the permission of local Taliban commanders. Muslim men who wander into this area without beards are routinely cast into prison as apostates. Kafirs (non-Muslims) are assumed to be enemy agents; most are put to death. Women are only permitted to appear in public in full burqa. And Shariah has become the rule of the land with regular occurrences of stoning, crucifixion and decapitation.
Over 1,500 Pakistanis in recent months, according to Mir, have been publicly executed for saying something in support of the regime of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and the coalition forces. Most were beheaded. The victims, Mir says, were "not ordinary people but very prominent people."
Regarding the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Mir contends that Afghan police are "weak"; that the coalition forces "limited in number"; and that the Pashtun people remain fiercely dedicated to Osama bin Laden and his jihad against the West.
Mir claims he has personally visited 12 provinces of Afghanistan in the past few weeks and has received first-hand confirmation that the Taliban has regrouped, recaptured much of the country, and remains intent upon ousting the coalition forces and toppling the puppet regime of President Hamid Karzai.
"If the president of Pakistan and the president of Afghanistan are not ready to accept my claims," Mir says, "they should accompany me with some international media personalities and the world will know who is right and who is wrong."
Support for the Taliban in the form of munitions and money is coming from Iran and Russia.
According to an April 17 article by Arnaud de Borchgrave of the Washington Times: "The Taliban is anything but a spent force. Suicide bombings are now commonplace in widely scattered parts of Afghanistan. Far removed from the Pakistani border, in the northern Afghan provinces, NATO-led forces uncovered huge Taliban arms caches -- e.g., 15,000 anti-personnel mines, 10,000 anti-tank mines, and 80 tons of TNT, all ‘Soviet' made.
The fact that 2 million pounds of supplies were air-dropped last year to U.S. troops chasing Taliban guerillas up and down mountains indicates: (1) a gradual increase of infiltration from Pakistan's tribal areas; and (2) the new Afghan army is not ready to take over. In fact, the Afghan military are still an estimated four years away from being able to fight on their own. Meanwhile, donor fatigue borders on donor exhaustion."
The Iranian-Taliban alliance, Mir maintains, is a new, unique and disturbing development. When the Taliban came to power in 1996, Mullah Omar and his army were decried by the Shiite mullahs in Iran for the massacre of thousands of Shiite Hazaras and Panjshiri Tajiks. Iran began to send money and arms to Ahmed Shah Massoud and his opposition army of Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras that became known as the "United Front" or "Northern Alliance." The Russians also came to the support Massoud's army to protect the interests of Uzbekistan.
The Northern Alliance continued to receive support from Iran and Russia until the launching of Operation Enduring Freedom (the codename for the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan) Oct. 7, 2001. Overnight, the Iranian and Russian advisers to Massoud became replaced by CIA operatives and Green Beret A team members.
A major blowback of the war on terror, according to Mir, is that Iran and Russia are now allied in Afghanistan on the side of their old enemy.
The first major indication of Iran's change of heart toward the Taliban came in the wake of the bombing of Tora Bora in December 2001, when Mullah Omar and hundreds of his soldiers and al-Qaida agents, scaled the mountains between the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, cut through the southern provinces of Afghanistan and headed west to Iran, where they found safe refuge, thanks to the intervention of Imad Mugniyah and the other leaders of Hezbollah.
The newly-arrived guests included such luminaries as Saad bin Laden, Osama's eldest son; Yaaz bin Sifat and Saif al-Adel, al-Qaida military planners; and Mohammed Islam Haani, the mayor of Kabul under the Taliban. Within Iran, they were placed in luxurious safe houses under the protection of SAVAMA, the Iranian intelligence service.
When the war on terror moved to Iraq, Iran came to serve as a base of operations for Aby Musab al-Zarqawi and other al-Qaida field commanders to mount attacks on the occupying armies.
This monumental event -- the union became Sunni with Shiite -- remained largely ignored by Western observers.
"We have been screaming at them [the Bush administration] for more than a year now that these guys all work together," an overseas operative told the Washington Post in June 2002. "What we hear back is that it can't because al-Qaida doesn't work that way. That is bull----. Here, on the ground, these guys all work together as long as they are Muslims. There is no other division that matters."
While the war dragged on in Iraq, Mullah Omar and other Taliban leaders returned to Pakistan, gained thousands of new recruits, secured control of much of the tribal areas, and launched the re-conquest of Afghanistan.
The Taliban soldiers are now accompanied by advisers and regulars from the Iranian army and, according to Mir, within Afghanistan, Mullah Omar has received visits from his old friend and fellow jihadi, Osama bin Laden.
-- G2B contributors Paul L. Williams, Ph.D., and David Dastych
