The Taliban’s Baghdad Strategy

Faridoon stares in alarm at the two NEWSWEEK reporters who just walked into his shop. "You guys better get out of town fast," the 21-year-old Afghan says as quietly as possible. "There's Taliban everywhere." Lying in the street outside are the burned-out hulks of a gasoline tanker and a shipping-container truck that someone set ablaze two nights before, right in front of Faridoon's motor-oil shop in Maidan Shar, the tiny, dust-blown capital of Maidan Wardak province, barely 25 miles south of Kabul. Only days earlier and a few miles farther down Highway 1, Taliban fighters ambushed and burned a 50-truck commercial convoy that was carrying fuel and supplies for the U.S. military. Even during the day, Faridoon and other townspeople warn, it's not safe to visit the area.

Afghanistan's insurgents have a new target—Kabul, and the belt of towns and villages surrounding the capital. "Today the Taliban are here," says Maidan Shar's white-smocked pharmacist Syed Mohammad, 32. "Tomorrow they may be in Kabul." The supply convoy was attacked in his home village, a dot on the map called Pul Surkh, where he says insurgents now travel freely, packing new AK-47s and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers. A series of spectacular recent terrorist incidents have shaken Kabul, a city that is all too familiar with violence. Blast walls and barbed wire have sprouted to defend against suicide bombers; residents are afraid to travel even a few miles outside the city. To some, the Afghan capital is beginning to feel like a new Baghdad.

That's exactly what the Taliban want. The insurgents can't approach the firepower of the Coalition and its Afghan National Army allies. "No one is going to take Kabul or any provinces or province capitals, or establish the Revolutionary Republic of Afghanistan," says a senior Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity. But the militants seem to have realized what the U.S. military did just before its surge in Iraq: that instability in the capital has an outsized psychological impact on a country. "Personal security is under fire," the Western diplomat admits. "That's an enormous problem."

So the Taliban have launched a surge of their own. By focusing on Kabul, "we can create panic and undermine the last vestiges of support for the regime," says a senior Taliban intelligence operative in Pakistan, declining to be named for security reasons. Mullah Bari Khan, a Taliban commander in Ghazni province, tells NEWSWEEK the group is pushing its agents and fighting men into Kabul from surrounding provinces—and the provincial governor, Osman Osmani, says he's afraid that insurgents from his area may be moving in that direction. Khan claims Taliban strategists have divided Kabul into 15 zones. Each one is supposedly to get its own operatives, with some bringing their families along to serve as cover while they work to recruit local support and prepare for new attacks.

The Taliban's psy-war offensive has been deadly and effective so far. In January the group attacked the heavily guarded Serena Hotel, a favorite of high-profile foreign visitors, killing seven. In April, Taliban snipers opened fire on a military parade, sending President Hamid Karzai scrambling for cover and killing one member of Parliament. And in July a suicide bomber in a new 4-by-4 packed with explosives rammed the Indian Embassy, directly across the street from the Afghan Interior Ministry, killing two Indian diplomats and some 40 other people. Qari Talha, one of the Taliban's chief agents in Kabul, boasts that the Indian Embassy blast was a great success, but says he had no advance knowledge of it. Afghan intelligence and foreign diplomats strongly believe the three attacks were planned and coordinated by insurgent commanders in Pakistan. Each cell operates independently of the others, Talha tells NEWSWEEK. He says the Taliban will continue to target senior government officials, embassies and hotels and restaurants frequented by foreigners.

A sense of life under siege is spreading across the city. The main street past the Indian Embassy and another major thoroughfare beside the Foreign Ministry are closed to traffic until further notice, just like the road that runs in front of the U.S. Embassy and NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) headquarters. Other streets that remain legally open are all but impassable because of the huge concrete blast walls that are planted outside potential terrorist targets. Private cops are posted at street entrances in some upper-class residential neighborhoods to check the identities of all visitors, and homes and businesses are protected by security guards, sandbagged fighting positions, concertina wire and floodlights. "Kabul is being transformed into a Baghdad-like Green Zone," says human-rights activist Ahmed Nadery. "It's not a pretty picture."

Many Afghans are sure the insurgents have the capital surrounded—a story quite possibly invented by the Taliban. "I'm certainly aware of the rumor," says the senior Western diplomat, adding dryly: "I don't think that's our assessment." While the number of clashes between Coalition troops and the Taliban has risen more than 40 percent over last year's figure, he says the number of terrorist attacks in Kabul overall is down. "Security in Kabul is actually pretty good," says a senior ISAF official, asking not to be named so he could speak freely. After the April attack on the military parade, Afghan police broke up several Taliban terrorist cells, and the security forces' intelligence network is solid, he says. Still, he admits, people are afraid. "The incidents in Kabul are few, but are very eye-catching," he adds. "The insurgents are attacking Afghan perceptions."

Everyone is feeling the effects. Wardak, the director of an Afghan nongovernment development group (he asks that his full name not be used for safety's sake), says that when he leaves for the office every morning his wife holds a Qur'an over his head and says a prayer that he will come home safely. When his bus passes a street that has been blocked for security reasons, fellow passengers often burst into curses and insults against Karzai and his government. "People ask why doesn't he resign and leave the country if he can't protect us," Wardak says.