JALALABAD, AFGHANISTAN — Hazrat Omar is ready to fight, although he says he's not quite sure who the enemy is.Mr. Omar and his ragtag group of 30 men, who are assigned to a guard post on the main highway between the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad and the Pakistani border, have been coming under attack in the past few months -- most recently when somebody lobbed a mortar shell at them.
The U.S. Army, which has a Special-Forces base in the area that also has come under fire in the past week, blames most of these incidents on an old bogey man -- a rejuvenated Taliban.
Mr. Omar is not convinced.
"They say it's the Taliban, but we believe this is the action of the Pakistan government," said the tough-looking warrior sporting a brown pie-crust pakool high on his dirty forehead. Beside him in the small, concrete bunker is a pile of rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
"These fighters are coming from the mountains to attack and then they go back to Pakistan. We don't know who they are, but they are trying to make trouble for the new government."
It is clear that someone is trying to destabilize President Hamid Karzai's regime in Kabul: According to United Nations statistics, several attacks a day are carried out across Afghanistan against the new government's forces, their American allies or foreign-aid organizations working in the country. But it is less clear who is behind them.
The rocket and grenade attacks are most common near Kandahar in the south and Jalalabad in the east -- two regions near the Pakistani border whose populations let the Taliban enter without a shot being fired during the last civil war.
In the eyes of U.S. forces, which still command about 11,500 coalition soldiers in Afghanistan, there's no question that the Taliban is behind the unrest. The Pentagon believes that the Islamic extremist movement, defeated on the battlefield in 2001, has reformed as a guerrilla organization, and that with help from its old allies in al-Qaeda, it has begun a fresh campaign against the Americans and anyone associated with Mr. Karzai's government.
Colonel Rodney Davis, spokesman for coalition forces in Afghanistan, said troops have frequently encountered Taliban remnants on the battlefield in recent months. The number and size of the clashes has been increasing, he said.
Last month, the Taliban appeared in force near the southern border town of Spin Boldak, but was beaten back with 24 dead, according to the Americans. But such large engagements are not the norm. More typical was the land-mine blast at a Kandahar mosque in late June that killed 17; or the attack on German peacekeepers earlier that month that left four dead.
"They tend not to want to take us on head on, and this is when they typically resort to acts of terrorism: criminal acts, killing people in mosques, burning up schools," Col. Davis told reporters at Bagram, north of Kabul -- one of the the two main U.S. bases in the country.
The leader of the movement, Mullah Mohammed Omar, remains a fugitive but has himself bolstered the idea that the Taliban is making a comeback, naming a leadership council this spring to head efforts to oust U.S. forces from Afghanistan and topple Mr. Karzai's "puppet" government.
Of late, Mr. Omar has stepped up his calls for attacks, putting out his messages through newspapers in Pakistan. Anti-foreigner screeds have been posted by Taliban sympathizers on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
The Taliban's apparent ability to retreat and regroup in Pakistan has become a thorny issue, hurting relations between Mr. Karzai and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, and calling into question Pakistan's status as a U.S. ally.
A decade ago, the Taliban movement sprang from the madrassas, Islamic schools in Pakistan's mountainous tribal areas along the border -- with copious aid from the country's Inter-Services Intelligence agency. Many observers believe the imperiled movement has chosen to return to its roots.
"There is a lot of Taliban-harbouring going on in Pakistan," said Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist who wrote a best-selling book chronicling the rise of Mr. Omar and his movement.
While Pakistan has co-operated in rounding up al-Qaeda suspects for the U.S., Mr. Rashid said Taliban members live quite openly in Quetta, Peshawar and other cities in that country's lawless tribal areas. "It's very hard for me to see history being repeated," he said.
Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan are now so bad that their troops frequently skirmish -- even as they are supposed to be co-operating in U.S.-led "antiterrorism" operations along the rugged border they share.
Taliban remnants are said to have formed an alliance with one of their former enemies, renegade warlord and former Afghan prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The Taliban focuses on the south while Mr. Hekmatayar's Hizb-e-Islami faction creates trouble in the east. The U.S. administration considers Mr. Hekmatyar -- who once got American backing -- such a threat that it tried last year to assassinate him with a missile attack on his car.
The Taliban's reach as a military force has been much reduced over the past two years -- few in Afghanistan will now admit to have ever supported the mullahs -- but the movement still casts a long shadow. A number of girls' schools have been burned to the ground in the conservative south of the country, a vicious reminder that the Taliban's repressive policies toward women had wide backing.
In Jalalabad, where Osama bin Laden once kept a home, the regional government moved recently to close down all billiards halls and video-game parlours, saying they were un-Islamic and distracted teenagers from their studies. For many, the move was reminiscent of a time when the Taliban government forbade almost all kinds of entertainment, from movies to kite-flying.
Yet to many in the city, blaming the Taliban for every bomb that goes off is oversimplifying Afghanistan's crowded political situation.
Mohammed Ishaq, deputy director of the Abdul Haq Foundation -- a non-governmental organization named after a deceased anti-Taliban fighter -- said the former regime is just one of many groups that have an interest in destabilizing the country.
"The Taliban and their supporters could be behind these types of incidents," he said, referring specifically to a recent attack that saw rockets lobbed into the centre of Jalalabad. "But there are many different groups who also could be doing this."
Foremost among the suspects, Mr. Ishaq said, should be the warlords the United States currently counts among its allies in Afghanistan. Men such as Hazrat Ali in Jalalabad and surrounding Nangarhar, and Gul Agha Sherzai in Kandahar rule with unquestioned authority over their realms, almost completely independent of the government in Kabul. Each arguably has an interest in sustaining the impression that Afghanistan is a violent, chaotic place, and that Washington needs all the allies it can get.
Nangarhar and Kandahar are two of the most violent provinces in Afghanistan, and they are also the country's two main centres for opium production, in which each of the half-dozen major warlords is believed to have a hand.
Muhammad Yaqoub Sharafat, the director of the Afghan Islamic Press wire service, which has been reporting the growing resistance to the U.S. presence in the country, says that in places such as Kandahar and Jalalabad, there's something bigger at hand than the last kicks of the old regime.
As he sees it, other groups are now shooting at the Americans, as Afghans come to view the U.S. presence in the country as just another occupation, similar to the Soviets during the 1980s.
Like the Americans and their allies in 2001, the Red Army also had an easy time taking control of Kabul and installing a friendly regime when they first came to Afghanistan. It was the 10 years of incessant guerrilla attacks from more than a dozen mujahedeen groups that forced them out.
"I think the attacks will keep happening as long as the Americans are here," Mr. Sharafat said.
Back into the abyss
SATURDAY: Welcome, Canadians
YESTERDAY: The warlords return
TODAY: Remember the Taliban
TOMORROW: A quiet revolution
