Support for Taliban deepens

Support Deepens For the Taliban, Refugees Report
U.S. Errors Fuel Sympathy 
 
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, November 8, 2001; Page A01 

QUETTA, Pakistan, Nov. 7 -- Afghans who have entered Pakistan in recent
days say that a month of U.S. airstrikes has failed to diminish popular
support in central and southern Afghanistan for the ruling Taliban militia,
which they say continues to exert a firm grip over the civilian population
despite a heavy loss of military equipment.

The arriving Afghans, interviewed in Quetta, near the Afghan border, said
sympathies toward the Taliban remain strong in part because of perceptions
among many Afghans that the U.S. bombing campaign has hurt civilians as
well as military and terrorist targets. Those views appear to have been
stoked by U.S. bombing errors, compounded by an aggressive Taliban
propaganda campaign casting the conflict as an American attack on Islam.

"The Americans said they would only target Osama bin Laden's bases," said
Abdul Mohammed, a shop owner who lives in the southern city of Kandahar,
the Taliban's stronghold. "But now they are killing ordinary Afghan people,
so people think that the Afghan people are America's enemy, not just the
Taliban and bin Laden."

U.S. military strategists had hoped the air attacks and the resulting
destruction would generate public anger at the Taliban, forcing its leaders
to surrender bin Laden and members of his al Qaeda network. But Afghan
refugees said just the opposite has occurred.

Mohammed, a weathered man in his fifties, traveled to Quetta two days ago
to talk to Pashtun tribal leaders about ways to encourage Afghans to join
an anti-Taliban movement in the country's central and southern regions.
Such an uprising, along with continued advances by the Northern Alliance
coalition in northern and eastern Afghanistan, has been seen as a key part
of the U.S. strategy to topple the radical Islamic militia and flush out
bin Laden.

Although the Northern Alliance has been buoyed by U.S. airstrikes on
front-line Taliban troops north of Kabul, Mohammed said he and his Pashtun
brethren in central and southern Afghanistan face an increasingly difficult
quest in generating opposition to the Taliban -- precisely because of the
military assault. "The bombing has not weakened the Taliban where we are,"
he said. "It has made them stronger."

Government buildings and Taliban military bases may have been hit, he said,
but added, "They still have their guns and their trucks."

"Every day we hear stories of more innocent people, more women and
children, getting killed by the American bombs," said Abdul Qadir, who owns
a small restaurant in the town of Spin Boldak, a few miles from the
Pakistani border.

Qadir said his friends and family despise the Taliban for not handing over
bin Laden. But, he said, they hate the United States as well for mounting
the military campaign. Now, "even the people who did not really like the
Taliban are supporting them," he said. 

U.S. officials contend the strikes have hobbled the Taliban, destroying
military facilities, severing communications systems, scattering fighters
and disrupting government services. Earlier this week, Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld proclaimed the Taliban was "not really functioning as a
government."

Refugees who said they were from Kandahar described a city with few
municipal services in the best of times. The major changes since the
bombings began, they said, have been failures in electricity and telephone
service. As they have for years, residents use hand pumps to get well water
and cook on small wood fires.

The refugees said the city has an ample supply of gasoline, which is
trucked in from Iran. In fact, fuel shipments have been moving through the
country in such vast quantities that some diesel vendors in Quetta say they
make purchases from smugglers at the Afghan border.

Commerce in Kandahar is a mixed bag, according to refugees and several
Pakistani journalists who recently traveled to the city with Taliban
escorts. Many shops are closed, but street markets still are crowded with
people buying fresh pomegranates, apples shipped in from Pakistan and
freshly baked flat bread.

"The markets were packed, the streets were crowded," said Shezada Zulfiqar,
a Pakistani journalist who visited Kandahar last week. "It looks like a
normal functioning city."

In the two weeks after the airstrikes began Oct. 7, refugees and aid
workers reported that Taliban soldiers had fled cities along with the
militia's much-feared religious police from the Ministry for the Promotion
of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. But over the past two weeks, Afghans here
said, many Taliban soldiers have returned to Kandahar in the daytime to
keep watch on street corners and zip around in their trademark pickup
trucks and muddy four-wheel-drive vehicles commandeered from U.N. aid
agencies. The religious police, too, are back, the refugees said, but are
not enforcing the dress code with their usual severity.

"The Taliban have said that they are relaxing the rules because life has
become more difficult," said Rachmat Ullah, 21, a farmer who used to live
in a village five miles outside Kandahar. "But they are still there. Nobody
dares to shave or go out without a burqa."

Mir Ahmed, a grandfather who left Kandahar five days ago with 16 relatives,
said that although fewer Taliban soldiers were on the streets than before
the bombings began, "it is clear they are still in charge." He said people
do not talk about politics, particularly efforts by the exiled former king
and other anti-Taliban leaders to hold a grand national council aimed at
forming a new government.

"People are still afraid of the Taliban," he said. "Life has not changed at
all."

Although several government buildings have been demolished by bombs --
including the virtue and vice ministry -- Taliban officials have relocated
their offices to mosques and offices of international aid agencies, the
refugees said.

After a hiatus at the start of the air war, the militia has resumed many of
its ordinary activities, including executions of convicted criminals.
Soldiers also have increased patrols in villages near Kandahar, often
showing up unannounced to spend the night, the refugees said.

In cities and villages, Muslim clerics have been trying to rally support
for the Taliban by portraying the bombing campaign as an assault on Islam,
the recent Afghan refugees said. "Our religious scholars keep making
announcements that [President] Bush has challenged the Muslims," said
Qadir, the restaurateur. "Even the people who dislike the Taliban are
Muslims, and they have been convinced by these messages."

Several of the refugees said, however, that the clerics have not been as
instrumental in shaping public attitudes as the relentless, month-long air
assault and the civilian casualties. "Osama is alive, but many of the
Afghan people are not," said an elderly man named Haji Mohammed who fled
Kandahar three days ago with his family after a building near his house was
destroyed, killing three civilians, he said.

Although the refugees and others who have recently left Afghanistan said
many people still fault the Taliban for provoking the U.S. attack, they
said those views are clearly in the minority.

"We thought that America was our friend because they supported us in our
war against the Russians," said Mohammed, the Kandahar shopkeeper. "But now
people have lost that soft corner in their hearts for Americans. Their
hearts are with the Taliban."




Louis Proyect
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