A Jihad Between Neighbors

Mullah Jihad Yar didn't want the Pakistani recruits when they were assigned to his Taliban unit a month ago. He still has reservations: the Afghan likes the Pakistanis' fighting spirit, but sometimes they get on his nerves. Like now. Scanning the main Kabul-to-Kandahar highway from a brush-covered knoll in Ghazni province, Yar calls spotters he has stationed miles to the north and south on the road. If they report Americans or Afghan police approaching, the Taliban officer and his men—three Afghans and two Pakistanis on this mission—will close in for an ambush. One of the recruits, Abrar Ahmed, can hardly control his itch for combat. The 25-year-old Pakistani keeps interrupting—"Is it time to go?" With a hint of irritation, Yar tells a NEWSWEEK reporter: "These Pakistanis are too hot-blooded. They want to fight every day."

Taliban commanders say hundreds of impatient young militants like Ahmed have poured into Afghanistan from Pakistan this spring. It's impossible to pin down the numbers precisely, but Western diplomats, NATO brass and U.S. military sources all say there's been a "significant increase" in cross-border attacks and traffic since March, and it worries them. It's not just the usual spring offensive, they say. One detail is especially troublesome: the burst of insurgent activity has coincided with Pakistani government efforts to cut a peace deal with tribal militants who have tormented Pakistan with kidnappings and suicide bombings since last summer. In return for a halt to attacks within Pakistan itself, the Army has agreed to pull back from its forward positions within the tribal areas. The gates into Afghanistan have essentially been left wide open, and the Taliban's friends are running wild. "We are extremely concerned," says a senior Western diplomat in Islamabad, asking not to be named on such a delicate issue.

Islamabad claims to be dealing only with tribal elders, not with bloodthirsty Qaeda supporter Baitullah Mehsud, but everyone knows he's in charge. Over the past two years, Mehsud and his hard-liner friends have killed roughly 200 moderate tribal leaders who dared to oppose them—"which makes a very effective message to the remaining ones," the diplomat adds. While Mehsud has denied responsibility for the December 2007 assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, his network of trained suicide bombers is believed to have carried out more than 50 attacks on Pakistani military targets since last summer. In recent months Afghan security forces have intercepted dozens of intended suicide bombers from Pakistan. "This Pakistani influx is a terrible trend," says the head of Kabul's counterterrorism force, Maj. Gen. Abdul Manan Farahi, whose men have apprehended nearly 50 would-be martyrs from across the border in the past year.

Not all the detainees have been willing volunteers—or adults. In a cell at a National Security Directorate lockup in downtown Kabul, an illiterate 14-year-old Pakistani named Shakirullah says he was pressed into service by the extremists. He had been a pupil at a little religious school of 50 or so students in Jandola district, near the North-West Frontier province town of Tank. One night in early March, just before bedtime, his mullah came to the dormitory and announced that Shakirullah had successfully completed his memorization of the Qur'an. In the morning the man gave him more news: the boy had demonstrated himself ready "to join the jihad against the American infidels." There was no need to fear, Shakirullah recalls his mullah promising: if the boy became a martyr, he would soon be born again as an even better Muslim.

The man took Shakirullah by cab to Miram Shah, a border town in North Waziristan largely controlled by militants. The boy was frightened by all the long-haired, bearded gunmen he saw in the streets before the mullah packed him into another taxi with a half-dozen other passengers for the bumpy journey to the Afghan town of Khowst. As they left, Shakirullah heard his teacher phoning ahead to say the boy was coming. "I had lost the will to resist," he says. "I only wanted to go home to see my mother." Another man, an Afghan, was waiting for him in Khowst and took him to a local mosque, where the boy spent the next three nights. Then the man and another Afghan came and picked him up in a car. The boy noticed a large package on the floor in front. On March 21, Afghan police stopped the car at a roadblock and arrested all three. Shakirullah considered himself lucky after the police showed him what was in the package: an explosive device. He remains in custody, wondering whether he'll be convicted as a terrorist or released.

Of course, most Pakistanis with the Taliban are grown men who have joined willingly. Many Pakistanis fought for the Taliban when they held sway in Afghanistan, but cross-border enlistments dropped to practically zero after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. This year the numbers have rebounded, and the pool has expanded beyond the mostly unlettered, Pashto-speaking mountaineers of the borderlands. Yar's impatient recruit Ahmed is clearly motivated by something besides rockbound tribal loyalty; he grew up in Taxila, a historic town just west of Islamabad in Punjab province. And the other Pakistani on the knoll, Sajad Shah, 25, comes from Haripur, an Urdu-speaking area in North-West Frontier province.

Shah is in a talkative mood. The tall, well-built high-school graduate, son of a farmer and shopkeeper, says he was driven to join the Taliban by news coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, especially stories on the Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay prison scandals, and by Qaeda and Taliban propaganda DVDs that are widely available in Pakistan. Early this year he met a roving Taliban recruiter who told him how and where he could sign up, and in early March Shah made his decision. He told his family he was going to Karachi to look for work. Instead he wrote his will, entrusted it to a friend and climbed aboard a bus to Miram Shah.