Taliban Two-Step: Can’t Sit Down Yet

Taliban members say bad things happen to Baradar's rivals. One was killed in 2006 by a U.S. airstrike in Kandahar. Pakistani forces arrested another in early 2007. Soon afterward, a U.S. commando raid blasted the notorious Mullah Dadullah Akhund. His brother, Mullah Mansoor Dadullah, took his place, only to be cashiered by Baradar. When Mansoor refused to step down, Pakistani forces seized him on his way into Afghanistan. All four victims belonged to the Kakar tribe, and rumors soon spread that Baradar, a member of the Popalzai clan, may have passed information to the Pakistanis and the Americans in order to eliminate Kakars from the Taliban leadership. (Baradar could not be reached for comment.)

Still, the Taliban are united in their visceral hatred of Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai. Taliban commanders say they might talk to the Americans, but they will never talk to him. Not that Washington's plan to send more combat troops is very popular in or out of the Taliban. "None of my Afghan friends outside official circles are asking us to send more forces," says a senior Western diplomat in Kabul, asking not to be named so he could speak more freely. "Foreign forces, no matter how careful they want to be, still create civilian deaths and make mistakes."

Every time an airstrike kills civilians or U.S. ground troops target the wrong house for a raid, popular support grows for the insurgents. "This isn't a scientific fact, but what we say is that for every guy we kill, we probably are recruiting at least three new guys," says a Western military officer who operates on both sides of the border and asked not to be quoted by name on sensitive issues. "You kill one guy, and then his brother or his cousin joins up to avenge his death." Many U.S. troops say the Taliban deliberately use Afghan civilians as human shields. Still, the U.S. military is preparing to send in 3,500 additional troops, and Pentagon planners say they might need as many as 20,000 more before the Taliban start to crumble. No one knows where those troops would come from.

The Taliban's border sanctuaries are a major focus. "Our weakest point is our dependence on Pakistan," says Zabibullah, who lives there himself. "Pakistan has the capacity to attack and dismantle us." Petraeus will be in Islamabad this week. A senior Pakistani official, asking not to be named discussing military plans, says the general has already sketched out his basic plan for a joint campaign against the Taliban. The official calls it a "hammer and anvil" approach, with U.S. forces pounding the insurgents inside Afghanistan and the Pakistanis as the anvil, stopping their retreat cold at the border. The Pakistani official says his country's military is willing to do its part.

The next president still needs to plan on a long, hard fight. NEWSWEEK asked both candidates for their views on Afghanistan, and John McCain's chief foreign-policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, responded via e-mail: "As Gen. David Petraeus has pointed out, one of the central lessons from the war in Iraq is that we can't simply kill our way out of an insurgency. Rather, insurgencies end when a critical mass of insurgents has made the calculus that they are better off if they switch sides … Simply put, insurgent ranks are more likely to begin to break when they are under pressure on all sides, and when they believe they are losing on the battlefield."

For his part, Barack Obama expressed doubts about how far the Iraqi template would stretch. "I agree with Gen. Petraeus that a topic worth exploring is whether similar types of opportunities exist in Afghanistan," he replied, also via e-mail. "[But] Iraq and Afghanistan are very different countries. We cannot expect to simply export the Awakening strategy from the tribes of Al-Anbar to the tribes of Helmand ... Any initiative to separate moderate from radical elements will have to be deeply rooted in the efforts of Afghans themselves."

It's an open question whether anyone in Afghanistan is capable of such efforts. Getting fighters like Mullah Sabir to the table will take some powerful convincing. He doesn't seem to care how long the war continues. "We don't have any time frame for victory or defeat," he says. "Our duty is to continue fighting." It's hard to defeat that kind of determination. But as Petraeus likes to say: "Hard is not hopeless."

With John Barry, Dan Ephron, Mark Hosenball, Jeffrey Bartholet, Suzanne Smalley and Richard Wolffe in Washington

© 2008