In These Remote Hills, A Resurgent al-Qaeda

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While no one can pinpoint bin Laden's whereabouts, Waziris proudly confirm that his fighters are being harbored in the area. Al-Qaeda men, they say, are living in remote settlements in the 10,000-ft. peaks above Kaniguram. Periodically they come down with a heavily armed escort of local militants to replenish their supplies; they have lots of money, the locals claim. Said Marjan, a local teacher, likes to practice his Arabic with them. "But they're very secretive," he complains. "The Arabs don't tell you anything." Dozens of Chechens and Uzbek members of al-Qaeda, along with their families, also fled to south Waziristan after the fall of the Taliban. "They're stuck here," explains a Waziri doctor, who says the militants believe that if they returned home, they would be hunted down. "They help the local farmers in the fields, so nobody complains." The Chechens and Uzbeks trade their labor for room and board.

Pakistan's man in Waziristan is assistant political agent Syed Anwar Ali Shah. "Nothing is happening over here," he says, but he and his staff never leave their fortified army garrison in Wana after nightfall. Islamabad has little sway over the district. The religious parties that have controlled Waziristan since elections last October hold up the deposed Taliban regime as a model of pure Islamic governance. They organize protests whenever the Pakistani army pursues Taliban or al-Qaeda agents who have fled to Waziristan to escape U.S. hunters. When national authorities ordered tribesmen--whose usual getup includes a rifle or pistol and a belt with a grenade or two attached--to stop bearing weapons in public, the local men responded by forming militias and threatening rebellion if the army tried to disarm them. The army has since backed off.

The alliance between the survivors of the Afghan war and their local hosts could mean Waziristan will become the biggest staging ground for future attacks on U.S. and Afghan forces in Afghanistan. A former Taliban official told TIME in a telephone interview that al-Qaeda and Taliban forces are preparing for a large offensive. He claimed that the Iranian government has been sending funds to the groups via drug smugglers who operate in the Baluchistan desert, where Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan intersect. An Afghan diplomat confirmed this account.

According to the former Taliban official, al-Qaeda agents are teaching the Taliban how to build bombs, to use remote controls to set off land mines under U.S. military vehicles, and to attach fuses to timers so that rockets fire long after the saboteurs have crept away. The same source says al-Qaeda operatives abroad plan to bring into Afghanistan, via Iran, some 800 satellite telephones so fighters can coordinate future ambushes. He claims that the militants have worked out an ever changing code so that U.S. eavesdroppers will think they are overhearing ordinary, mundane phone calls.