A Jihad Between Neighbors

He was sent to a training camp near town where he learned to fire an AK-47 and a grenade launcher and studied basic guerrilla tactics. After two weeks the trainers lined him up with more than 100 other new graduates, ready for assignment to Taliban units inside Afghanistan. About three quarters were from the tribal areas, he says, and most of the others were from North-West Frontier province and Punjab, but a few had come from as far away as Sindh. Several of the Punjabis had some previous combat experience against Indian soldiers in Kashmir. Many of the camp's instructors had fought there, too.

Yar initially balked at the order to get some trainees from Miram Shah. He had plenty of local volunteers, Yar told his provincial commander. But Yar says his boss insisted: "It would be against Islam to prevent a believer from joining the jihad." So Yar made the trip, examined the candidates and chose Ahmed, Shah and another Pakistani. Yar says Taliban subcommanders came to the recruitment fair from as far away as Kandahar and Helmand. One of Yar's neighboring subcommanders, Sher Agha, gleefully tells NEWSWEEK he brought home 14 Pakistani fighters, including several from Punjab, bringing his unit's total strength to 50.

Just before dawn one morning in late March, Yar and his Pakistani recruits crossed the rugged, isolated border on foot, accompanied by two bodyguards. They hiked over goat trails to a pro-Taliban village a day's walk away and went on from there, sometimes by hired motorbike and sometimes on foot, for nearly a week before they reached Yar's base. Shah is clearly enjoying the adventure. "I had a good life back home," he says. "But I prefer this past month's hardships, dangers and struggle to my past 25 years."

Yar appreciates the Pakistanis' enthusiasm but says they can be a problem at times. "Some villagers don't like them," he says. "They make mistakes with the people, as they don't know the local customs and values." Punjabis who don't speak Pashto are especially prone to offend and upset the locals, he says, and they can be picky about their rations, too. They prefer black tea to the green tea local Pashtuns drink, and they crave chili-spiced foods that are not part of the local diet. Even so, Yar adds, the Pakistanis tend to be more aggressive and motivated than some of his local recruits, so their presence is a worthwhile trade-off.

Most Western analysts estimate that Pakistanis still constitute less than 20 percent of the Taliban's total fighting forces. Although the Afghan insurgents suffered heavy casualties last year in Afghanistan, Yar insists that's not why so many Pakistanis are being brought in now. Western military experts agree. "However many insurgents were killed last year—5,000, 7,000 or more—the numbers don't really matter," says a senior NATO officer who is not authorized to speak for attribution. "In a country of 32 million, including 6 million Pashtun [males] from the ages of 14 to 44, that's fertile recruiting ground."

Raw recruits from Pakistan also can't offset the Taliban's most serious losses. More than 100 midlevel Taliban commanders were killed last year, the NATO officer says—and Yar admits the insurgents suffered heavy losses of key men. He estimates that perhaps up to half the deputy commanders in Ghazni have died, seriously impairing the Taliban's command and control capability. As a result, senior Taliban chiefs have ordered their midlevel commanders not to meet in groups larger than two, and to concentrate on small-unit ambushes and on IED and suicide bombing attacks instead of more-conventional ground attacks.

Some Afghan security officials angrily accuse Islamabad of deliberately exporting its problems across the border; the Afghans note the once close ties between radicals who fought in Kashmir, for instance, and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency. "A lot of these Kashmiri groups and their unemployed guys with guns have turned to the tribal areas and the Afghan border," agrees the senior Western diplomat in Islamabad. But the diplomat and other Western officials in the region tend to think the Pakistanis are not directing the radicals to turn their fire elsewhere so much as looking the other way and hoping they do. And the White House has decided to support Pakistan's fledgling democracy even if it does give more breathing space to the Taliban.