[Fresh Ink] Kabul under Taliban's thumb

[Richard Menec]

<http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081014.afghan-kabul131/BNStory/International/>

Reversal of fortune leaves Kabul under Taliban's thumb

GRAEME SMITH

>From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

October 14, 2008 at 12:31 PM EDT

KABUL - At a gas station on the outskirts of Kabul, lounging in the shade of
a transport truck, Mohammed Raza describes how he escaped death.

Last month, a U.S. contractor promised him $10,000 if he'd drive a truck
full of diesel from Kabul to Kandahar, offering seven times more than he
could earn by transporting his usual shipments of sugar. But the Taliban
forbid drivers from carrying fuel to the foreign troops, he said, and the
insurgents run checkpoints on the road between Afghanistan's two largest
cities. He rejected the offer. One of his friends took the assignment, he
said, and the Taliban cut off his head.

"Many drivers now are selling their lives," the 25-year-old said, nervously
twisting the fringe of his beard.

The Taliban are isolating Afghanistan's capital city from the rest of the
country, choking off important supply routes and imposing their rules on the
provinces near Kabul. Interviews suggest that the Taliban have gained
control along three of the four major highways into the city, and some
believe it's a matter of time before they regulate all traffic around the
capital.

That marks a shocking reversal of the insurgents' fortunes. Taliban were
fleeing along the highways out of Kabul less than seven years ago,
abandoning their government offices, dying under a hail of U.S. air strikes
as they scrambled to flee. Now the Taliban and their allied militias are
creeping back up the same roads, quietly showing their presence on the
outskirts of the city.

Kabul itself is heavily guarded, and nobody expects a frontal assault.

But the insurgents don't need to attack the capital; by hobbling the
government's ability to reach its own citizens beyond the city gates,
security analysts say, the Taliban make the rulers of Kabul irrelevant in
broad swaths of the country. It's more than a propaganda victory; the
insurgents are grabbing the same political high ground the Taliban exploited
during their previous sweep to power in the 1990s, by positioning themselves
as the best enforcers of security in rural Afghanistan.

The roadblocks have also started to pinch the foreign troops. Military bases
find themselves running short of fuel and other supplies.

Commercial aircraft were repeatedly warned this summer that they would not
be able to purchase fuel at Kandahar Air Field, and the airfield shut down
some facilities to reduce electricity needs during the peak fighting season.
The insurgents have also targeted aid shipments, with 800 tonnes of food
stolen from World Food Program truck convoys in the first half of the year -
only about 0.5 per cent of the WFP's average food deliveries in Afghanistan
for a six-month period - but still enough to feed 80,000 people for a month
during a food crisis in which the WFP says it's facing a vast shortfall in
supplies.

Figures obtained from Afghanistan's Interior Ministry show the government's
count of major attacks on supply trucks around Kabul has increased sharply
this year, with 80 incidents in the first six months as compared with 45
over the entire previous year. Analysts say those numbers are conservative,
but even so, the official statistics illustrate how strikes on supply routes
are growing faster than the general rise in violence.

People who work for the government, or have any association with the foreign
presence, now travel covertly on the main highways of southern, central, and
eastern Afghanistan. They disguise themselves as rural peasants, carry no
identification cards, and erase numbers from their cellphones that might
connect them with the government.

Some devise even more elaborate strategies for dealing with Taliban
checkpoints, arranging for friends to impersonate religious figures who can
vouch for them if they're stopped by the insurgents.

Truck drivers often leave a rear door open at the back of their
tractor-trailers, securing their cargo with a spider web of ropes, so that
Taliban can easily look inside and check the shipment for anything forbidden
by the insurgency. The Taliban even scrutinize the drivers' customs
paperwork to certify that the goods are destined for non-military consumers.

The problem of Taliban influence on the southern highways grew especially
acute this summer, said Brigadier-General Richard Blanchette, NATO's chief
spokesman in Afghanistan.

"There was this saying, that the insurgency begins where the highway
finishes," Gen. Blanchette said, referring to a popular aphorism among the
foreign troops. "Well, for a while it was almost the opposite."

The Taliban make a point of allowing ordinary Afghans to drive the roads
without harming them, but Gen. Blanchette said their actions are starting to
affect the average traveller.

"We had the infrastructure attacked - which was a first, you know, the
insurgents had not destroyed bridges before," he said. "The farmers couldn't
bring their products any more, and it choked the economy."

He added that NATO has recently successfully countered the Taliban strategy
by devoting more aircraft, surveillance, and Afghan troops to patrolling the
highways south of Kabul. The result has been a drop in insurgent attacks on
those routes in the final weeks of summer, he said, although he acknowledged
that the slowing violence may represent a seasonal trend; attacks always
decrease as winter approaches. He added that patrolling the highways has
been difficult for Afghan troops because they're spread thin.

Not only do the Afghan security forces lack numbers, but they're also
corrupt and even colluding with the insurgents, said Colonel Asadullah Abed,
chief of the criminal investigation division for the 10 central provinces
around Kabul.

The 40-year-old policeman says he's no friend of the Taliban, and has a
sheaf of threatening letters from the insurgents to make his point.

But he worries that his colleagues at small posts outside the city are not
so devoted to the government's cause.

Each of the four major gateways into Kabul are guarded by Afghan police,
soldiers, and intelligence officers, Col. Abed said, but the insurgents
easily bribe their way through. People with loyalties to the insurgents have
also infiltrated the ranks of Afghanistan's security establishment, he
added: "They're not working honestly."

Col. Abed paused to look at a reporter's military-issued accreditation card,
and noted that the small piece of identification would be a death warrant on
most highways outside the city. "You're a foreigner travelling with this,"
he said, pointing to the ID badge, "and you can travel the Shomali road
okay, but any other road they will capture you after one kilometre."

The colonel may have been exaggerating for effect, but it's widely accepted
that the road to the Shomali plains now serves as the only genuinely safe
passage out of the capital. Even foreigners drive the road for fun, roaring
up the paved highway that crests the ridges north of Kabul and enjoying a
picnic by the river, or meandering up the scenic Panjshir valley.

But at a bus stop on the dusty edge of the Shomali plains, drivers and
ticket-sellers say even this road is getting worse.

"Only one road remains now, this road, but in a year you won't be able to
travel even this one," said Nafis Khan, 36, a ticket vendor.

"The Taliban are not the problem," he added. "When people saw the bad
behaviour of the foreigners and government, the Taliban stood up to protect
them. Day by day, their power increases."

Still, insurgent leaders admit they still don't have a choke hold on the
city. The Globe and Mail sent a researcher to the mountains of Nirkh
district in Wardak province, southwest of Kabul, where a large group of
Taliban often gather to raid the main highway between Kabul and Kandahar.

Wearing a black turban, surrounded by heavily armed men, the Taliban
commander bemoaned the fact that his power is vastly greater on the Kandahar
road than the Shomali road. He claimed that his men ambush vehicles three
times a week on the Kandahar road, but such brazen acts are not possible on
the northern road.

"Only the Shomali road is safer than others, because the influence of
Taliban is less," he said, in a video-recorded interview. "Those are
Farsi-speaking people [on the Shomali road], so for Taliban it's difficult
to enter that area, and that road is the only one secure for government and
their convoys."

The Taliban's struggle to gain control of Shomali road reflects the
insurgents' broader effort to get a foothold outside of their traditional
ethnic group. In recent years, most of the Taliban's support has come from
Pashtun tribesmen, and during the previous Taliban government the
Pashtun-dominated regime fought bitter wars against the Farsi-speaking Tajik
and Uzbek warlords of the north.

One of the ways the Taliban are trying to broaden their appeal is by proving
themselves better than the government at providing road security. It's a
propaganda move aimed at people such as Del Aga, 40, a bus driver, who says
the police have robbed him more often than bandits or insurgents. He usually
doesn't slow his bus for men with guns because he's afraid of criminals, he
said, but he feels obligated to stop for uniformed police with marked police
trucks. "I stop for the police, and they rob my passengers," he said.

Even when the police aren't directly implicated in the shakedowns, Afghans
often blame the government forces for failing to stop them.

Nasar Ahmed, 38, said his bus was ransacked by bandits only a short distance
from a police checkpoint, leaving him with the impression that the local
authorities were either neglecting their duties or helping the robbers. He
has been working as a bus driver for 14 years, mostly on the road between
Kandahar and Kabul, and he says security on the highways has reached its
worst point since the civil wars of the early 1990s.

The major exceptions to the worsening trend are the zones where the Taliban
have completely seized control, Mr. Ahmed said. Buses frequently had trouble
with a large band of thieves in Nimroz province until the Taliban drove them
away, he said.

"The areas that belong to the government are less secure than the Taliban
areas," said the big-bearded driver.

In areas of Wardak province described by locals as dominated by the
insurgents, only 30 kilometres' drive away from Kabul, shopkeepers told The
Globe and Mail's researcher that security has largely improved since the
Taliban took over.

"Our security is better, we don't have any problem with Taliban, and the
government is far from us," said the keeper of a mud-walled shop selling dry
goods and hardware.

That's the impression that Taliban say they're trying to create. An
insurgent commander emphasized that the Taliban do not demand road tolls and
refrain from attacking vehicles not associated with the government or the
International Security Assistance Force.

"Local traders' vehicles can go and transport every kind of thing that they
need to carry," the commander said, surrounded by fighters on a riverbank
about two kilometres from the government centre for Wardak province. "And
the tankers or vehicles that belongs to ISAF or government, we shoot them
and burn them."

Despite the insurgents' claims of bringing security for ordinary people,
however, the highways in Taliban territory are still rife with stories of
banditry. Mohammed Amin, 52, a shopkeeper, said he was driving on a winter
morning toward Kabul from Kandahar in a convoy of five buses when they were
stopped by a roadblock. Criminals searched all the buses, he said, taking
money, cellphones, and other valuables from the passengers. A man sitting
beside him lost all the money he'd saved from working six months in
Pakistani coal mines.

"The thieves did their work very slowly and with confidence, because they
weren't afraid of anybody," Mr. Amin said.

Taliban checkpoints also terrify many travellers, if they have the slightest
connection with the government or reason to worry that the insurgents might
get suspicious.

A man who identified himself only as "Matin" said he was riding a bus to
Kabul from Kandahar with friends when the vehicle was pulled over by
insurgents.

"My friend looked like a military guy, because he was tall and
 clean-shaven," the young man said. "The Taliban pulled me aside with my
friend. When the bus was driving away, I slipped back into the crowd and got
inside the vehicle. My friend was captured." His friend worked for a
logistics company and the Taliban eventually released him, after local
notables petitioned for his freedom.

Many others aren't so fortunate. Taliban have executed so many suspected
collaborators on the highways this year that local truck drivers held a
protest at the Spin Boldak border crossing in Kandahar in late June,
refusing to work until the government gave them better security on the
roads.

Mohammed Naim, 40, a ticket seller for a bus company in Kabul, said the
situation has become so well known that he doesn't bother warning most
passengers about the likelihood of hitting a Taliban checkpoint.

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