For the Taliban, A Crime That Pays

Still, most victims are Afghans. Hardly anyone else dares to travel overland now. Not long after the Koreans' capture, Mustapha Barakzai was grabbed on the same stretch of highway. The 22-year-old student, whose mother is a member of Afghanistan's Parliament, was heading for Kabul by car with his uncle and two friends, one of them a policeman named Pahlawan. Mansoor's gunmen were waiting by the road for them; one of them had the car's license number written on his hand. He showed it to Barakzai as the four men were being hauled away.

On the morning of Sept. 13—the first day of Ramadan last year—the gunmen dragged Pahlawan off, and half an hour later they took Barakzai to a nearby field. His friend lay in the dust, bound and blindfolded. The gunmen forced Barakzai to watch while one of them cut off the policeman's head. Then Mansoor stuffed a mobile phone into Barakzai's hand and ordered: "Call your mother." Barakzai's family paid $100,000 as fast as they could raise the cash. His captors set him free a few hours later, along with the other two survivors. The kidnappers kept the car, offering to return it for an extra $10,000. Soon after Barakzai's release he heard that Mansoor had been killed in a U.S. military operation. But more than a year after the ordeal, the young man still gets threatening phone calls saying money won't save him if he's ever caught again.

No one knows how many Afghans have been kidnapped by the Taliban. Until recently the field was a wide-open scramble among local guerrilla bands who kept most of the proceeds for themselves. This May the organization's No. 2 leader, Mullah Bradar, finally issued a set of rules for all Taliban kidnappings. Commanders are now required to notify the supreme military council, the shura, whenever a kidnapping takes place; no one but representatives designated by Mullah Bradar may negotiate terms for a hostage's release or take ransom payments, and at least two thirds of any cash deal must go to the central shura. A special panel has been set up to investigate alleged rule breakers.

Local chiefs have begun feuding over the best roads. In more than a half-dozen provinces, the shura has ruled that each backcountry subcommander will be granted a stretch of main highway. But the turf battles are starting to recall the days of the warlords in the early 1990s. In some places, Taliban kidnappers appear to be working with professional criminals and corrupt police, much as the three groups collaborate in the opium provinces. And the threat is spilling across the border into Pakistan's tribal areas.

The attacks have paralyzed large parts of Afghanistan. International aid workers have been forced out, major projects have been halted and business confidence, already shaky, has been all but destroyed. One reason Afghans welcomed the Taliban's rise in the '90s was because the armed group drove out the bandits and warlords, making it safe to move around the country. Now the same group is making it anything but. The Afghan National Army is stretched too thin to keep even the main highways secure, and the Coalition has never had enough forces in the country to fill the gap.

It's small comfort that the Taliban are having trouble keeping order in their own ranks. For kidnapping Johan Freckhaus, the military council awarded $20,000 to Anwar Farooq, the local chief who directed the job, along with $2,000 to each of the 23 fighters who carried it out. That's good money in a country as poor as Afghanistan, but Taliban sources say Farooq was furious: he thought he and his men deserved a far bigger cut. At last word he was still arguing with the higher-ups.

Freckhaus himself says he's not sure what his freedom cost. "The Taliban said there would be a prisoner exchange," he told NEWSWEEK last month at a café in Paris. "The government said a ransom was paid. Both sides have their story." One thing he's sure of: he's not moving back to Afghanistan until the place gets a little safer—and that might take a while.

With Eric Pape in Paris and Barbie Nadeau in Rome

© 2008