Where the Jihad Lives Now

Militancy is woven into the fabric of Pakistani society. At independence in 1947, the country's whisky-swilling founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, used Islam to forge a sense of national identity. Since then the various military dictators who have periodically ruled the country have found jihad to be a convenient means of distracting their citizens and furthering their foreign-policy aims. Gen. Zia ul-Haq turned Pakistan into a base for the mujahedin waging war on the Soviets in Afghanistan—and won billions in American aid in the process. In the 1990s, after the Soviet defeat, generals like Musharraf dispatched thousands of those fighters to wage a guerrilla campaign in Kashmir. Many trained across the border in Afghanistan, in the same camps that Al Qaeda had set up under the Taliban.

After 9/11 Musharraf promised Washington that he would cut off support for such groups, including the Taliban. Early on, he authorized the arrests of several top Qaeda leaders in Pakistani cities, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and Abu Zubaydah, a top Qaeda organizer. But Musharraf's efforts have always been somewhat halfhearted, constrained by the deep sympathies that many of his countrymen have for jihadists. For decades Pakistanis were taught that the guerrillas were Muslim heroes, fighting for national honor and security. Such loyalties cannot be turned off like a tap. Several of the militants' onetime spymasters, both inside and outside the government, maintain links to their former charges. The security services will go after certain figures—particularly foreign Qaeda fighters—but ask others simply to lie low. Many officials—even many ordinary citizens—still think the jihadists should be preserved for future use as a strategic weapon, especially against India, long after America's War on Terror is over.

The safe haven provided by Pakistan has already had dire effects on U.S. and NATO efforts to fight the resurgent Taliban next door in Afghanistan. Taliban fighters now pretty much come and go as they please inside Pakistan. Their sick and injured get patched up in private hospitals there. Guns and supplies are readily available, and in the winter, when fighting traditionally dies down in Afghanistan, thousands retire to the country's thriving madrassas to study the Qur'an. Some of the brainier operatives attend courses in computer technology, video production and even English. Far from keeping a low profile, the visiting fighters attend services at local mosques, where after prayers they speak to the congregation, soliciting donations to support the war against the West. "Pakistan is like your shoulder that supports your RPG," Taliban commander Mullah Momin Ahmed told NEWSWEEK, barely a month before a U.S. airstrike killed him last September in Afghanistan's eastern Ghazni province. "Without it you couldn't fight. Thank God Pakistan is not against us."

Dozens of Taliban commanders have moved their wives and children to Pakistan, where they live in the suburbs of cities like Peshawar and Islamabad. This keeps them out of the reach of Afghan authorities, who have been known to arrest relatives in order to track down guerrilla fighters. Mullah Shabir Ahmad is a member of the Taliban's 30-man ruling council, or shura. He's moved his family to a modest neighborhood of nearly identical brick and mud-brick houses in Quetta. Inside his home he shows a visiting NEWSWEEK reporter a room filled with new bolts of cloth, Ramadan gifts from the city's Taliban sympathizers. He spends roughly half the year inside Pakistan, shuttling between Quetta, Karachi, Peshawar and the tribal belt to raise funds, recruit new fighters and plot strategy with other commanders.

The insurgents have no centralized supply system. Instead, each senior provincial commander operates his own network. Din Mohammad, a tall, portly man in his mid-30s, looks after the needs of insurgents who fight for commander Gul Agha in southern Helmand province. With cash from Afghanistan and from his own fund-raising efforts he buys shoes and warm clothes for Taliban fighters, walkie-talkies and satellite phones—even weapons, explosives and remote-control devices. The benign stuff he trucks into Afghanistan openly. The lethal items are hidden in shipments of clothes and food or under the baggage of Afghan refugees on their way home. Some Taliban chiefs prefer to shop for themselves. Earlier this month Mullah Rehmat, a Taliban commander, rested at a youth hostel in Peshawar while he waited for the master gunsmiths of Dera Adam Khel village to finish a $750 sniper rifle he'd ordered.

The contrast to 2002 is striking. Back then, in the first flush of Musharraf's crackdown on extremists, a NEWSWEEK reporter met Agha Jan, a former senior Taliban Defense Ministry official, in an orchard outside the city of Quetta. A nervous Jan recounted how he had to change homes every two nights for fear of capture, and he fled when some local villagers approached. Jan now has a house outside Quetta, where he lives when he's not fighting with Taliban forces across the border in his native Zabul province. Reporters in Peshawar, a strategic Pakistani border city some 50 miles east of the historic Khyber Pass and the Afghan border, say it's not unusual these days to receive phone calls from visiting Taliban commanders offering interviews, or asking where to find a cheap hotel, a good restaurant or a new cell phone.