The Taliban’s Baghdad Strategy

The fear is worst among those who have to travel south of the capital. Last week Wardak canceled plans to attend a cousin's wedding near Maidan Shar after relatives told him his name was on a Taliban hit list. A radio executive, also asking not to be named, says the danger of being kidnapped kept him from attending a relative's funeral this July in Logar province, just south of Kabul. In separate incidents two weeks ago, two judges and a member of Parliament were kidnapped in broad daylight on a main road in the province. "We are in danger of losing Logar," says Shakeela Hashimi, a member of Parliament from the province, who says government control vanishes there at sundown and doesn't return until the next morning. "The gap is widening further between the government and the community," she says, blaming mismanagement, rampant corruption and the reluctance of many officials to leave their offices and meet with the people on their own ground—not to mention a stray Coalition airstrike that hit a teacher's house in July, killing his young son.

Everyone agrees that to venture beyond Maidan Shar is to risk one's life. The highway to Kandahar, rebuilt and widened by the Americans as a symbol of hope and progress after the Taliban's collapse, has become a shooting gallery. Battles and roadside bombs have ripped up the pavement and damaged bridges, and the shoulders are littered with burned-out vehicles. Afghan journalist Ghusu Khan recently made the nerve-racking bus trip from Kandahar to Kabul and vows he'll never do it again. A few days earlier, a long-bearded friend of his was on a bus that was stopped by Taliban fighters. The gunmen ordered Khan's friend and 11 other men off the bus and shot two of them dead beside the road—one because he was carrying a photo of his brother, a soldier in the Afghan National Army. Khan's friend was released five days later after his family paid a $20,000 ransom.

Drivers at the Kabul-to-Ghazni taxi stand, on the capital's southern outskirts, say their business is down 40 percent. Some refuse to be interviewed, saying they're afraid to talk with foreigners because Taliban agents are watching. "Security has never been worse," says driver Zahir Khan. Another driver tells of an encounter he had a week earlier with a group of 20 armed Taliban who were stopping traffic just south of Maidan Shar, checking all passengers' IDs and looking for anyone affiliated with the government. He says he saw at least two men being led away. "One way to dishearten people is to limit or take away their freedom of movement," says the ISAF official. "If the Afghans can't keep these roads open and safe, morale will plummet further."

The Taliban gave plenty of advance notice of their plans. "Our military operations will focus on the capital cities of the four regions of the country, including Kabul," said the group's second in command, a man known as Mullah Brader, in a long interview with a Taliban Web site in September 2007. The first stage, he said, would be the "surveillance and control of roads leading to Kabul from Maidan Shar" and other areas just south of the capital. The primary tactic, he said, would be "martyrdom-seeking [i.e., suicide] attacks and roadside blasts, as this tactic is the most effective in inflicting more losses upon the enemy."

Soon after the interview was posted, Taliban sources say, the group's operatives began reactivating networks in villages that had long been peaceful. Sleeper agents and sympathizers who had holed up quietly in Maidan Wardak and Logar ever since 2001 began enlisting new fighters from the ranks of unemployed young men in neglected rural villages. Afghan insurgents and foreign jihadists were sent in from longtime Taliban strongholds in eastern Afghanistan and across the Pakistan border in Waziristan to train, equip and direct the reconstituted units.

Faridoon and his pharmacist neighbor, Mohammad, say the buildup in their home villages began several months ago; local police and the Afghan National Army seemed unable to prevent it. At weddings, funerals and Friday prayers, local mullahs exhort their congregations to support the Taliban and oppose the government. The group pays newly recruited fighters roughly $200 a month, the pharmacist says—almost double the pay of police and Afghan National Army soldiers. According to one Maidan Shar police officer, intelligence estimates now place the insurgents' armed strength in the province at nearly 1,000 fighters.

The province's newly installed governor, Mohammad Halim Fidai, downplays the threat. "The insurgents don't have a place in the people's hearts," he says. "They are not strong here and can't threaten Kabul." Besides, he says, the Afghan National Army has just sent reinforcements to bolster security, especially at the insurgents' favorite ambush points along the highway. But rumors persist that the Taliban have set up car-bomb and suicide-belt factories in Maidan Wardak and neighboring Logar province, close to the capital.

Even the governor admits he's concerned about the "outsiders" who are joining the locals. Al Qaeda is now sending more fighters to Afghanistan, according to a senior Taliban commander who was recently interviewed by NEWSWEEK on the Afghan-Pakistan border but who declined to be named for security reasons. He says Al Qaeda's leaders agree with U.S. presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama that Afghanistan, not Iraq, is their central battleground against the West. "We are seeing more foreign fighters," the senior Western diplomat confirms. "They are Turks, Chechens, Arabs, Uzbeks, Turkmen and Pakistanis." And they're making the Taliban more dangerous. The foreigners are better equipped and trained than the locals, and they tend to stand and fight rather than disengage after the first exchange of gunfire, as Afghan insurgents generally do.