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02/13/2006:

"Where the Taliban still rule"

PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- Four years after the United States led the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, a new Taliban movement has taken control in a swath of neighboring Pakistan.

Taliban militants control much of Waziristan, a rocky, mountainous area twice the size of Long Island along the Pakistani border. Despite a heavy presence of Pakistani troops, Waziristan has become the largest and most protected sanctuary for Islamic militant guerrillas in the Afghan-Pakistani theater of the "global war on terror."

U.S. military officers and Afghan officials in three neighboring provinces of Afghanistan say the infiltration of guerrillas from Waziristan has continued unabated and is the primary engine of the continued Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. Waziristan "is very important to the Taliban" as a base of operations in the Afghan-Pakistani theater, said Mike Scheuer, a former top analyst at the CIA.

And it is likely to stay that way for years, analysts say. "The strength of the militants in Waziristan has built up over a generation," said Behroz Khan, the regional bureau chief for a Pakistani daily, The News. At best, "it will take a generation to pacify and integrate this region" into the Pakistani state, he said.
newsday.com


The province where the Taliban were never defeated
he Taliban never really fell in Helmand province. While the outside world was celebrating the end of the Taliban regime after the fall of Kandahar in 2001, the Taliban were still in control of most of Helmand. It was in Helmand that the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, took refuge after the fall of Kandahar, and from which he is believed to have staged a dramatic escape on the back of a motorcycle in early 2002. There were even claims from the Taliban in 2003 that the world's most wanted man, Osama Bin Laden, had spent some time on the border between Helmand and the neighbouring province of Nimroz, under the noses of US forces.

When a British security contractor was forced out of his car at gunpoint, taken into the hills and beheaded in the nearby province of Farah last year, there were reports that the Taliban insurgents responsible were from Helmand.

Over the past year, Helmand has emerged as one of the main centres of the Taliban insurgency. Although it is only now attracting the attention of the outside world, the Taliban insurgency has been raging in Helmand ever since the original victory of US-led forces in Afghanistan in 2001. As early as 2002, the insurgents tried to assassinate the Afghan intelligence chief in the province. In March 2003, two US special forces soldiers were ambushed and killed by the Taliban in the province.

But over the past year the insurgency has rapidly grown in intensity, with the import of tactics from Iraq. There has been a spate of suicide bombings, beheadings, and attacks on soft targets, where previously the Taliban preferred to attack US and Afghan forces head on.


Into the valley of death: UK troops head into Afghan war zone
uicide bombings and firefights, Western troops under attack, sectarian clashes between Shia and Sunni, foreigners taken hostage. Days of escalating violence have left dozens of people dead and more than a hundred injured. This is not Iraq but Afghanistan, a conflict which has now overtaken on the grim league table of body counts - 89 killings in the last eight days in Afghanistan compared with 54 in Iraq during the same period.

It is into this maelstrom that the Royal Marines - the first batch of 5,700 British troops being sent to Afghanistan - will begin deploying this week in a mission lasting at least three years at a cost of £1bn.

With no exit strategy from Iraq in sight, British forces are entering another deadly conflict. Tony Blair's insistence that there should be no sizeable withdrawal from Iraq until the security situation appreciably improves means that contingency plans for a large-scale reduction in numbers have had to be shelved. But last week John Reid, the Secretary of State for Defence, appeared to pave the way for a "significant" withdrawal from Iraq even if the country continued to face serious problems.