Remember Afghanistan?

Monday, Mar. 08, 2004 By BY TIM MCGIRK | KABUL AND MICHAEL WARE | KANDAHAR
ON GUARD: A U.S. soldier with the 10th Mountain Division patrols in Kandahar, former Taliban country
KATE BROOKS/POLARIS FOR TIME
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The warlords' land grabs have been sustained by the return of Afghanistan's most lucrative cash crop: opium. Outlawed by the Taliban in 2000, opium-poppy cultivation has spread from eight provinces in 1994 to 28 today. U.N. experts expect this year's crop to yield 3,600 tons of opium—75% of the world's heroin. According to the U.N., the combined income of poppy farmers and opium smugglers last year was $2.32 billion—equal to half of Afghanistan's official GDP. A Western anti-narcotics expert in Kabul estimates that 60% of the country's regional warlords are profiting from the drug traffic, using the cash to fund their armies and, in doing so, weakening the reach of Karzai's government in the provinces. A Cabinet minister who tried to stop traffickers two years ago was assassinated in Kabul, reportedly by a drug cartel. "Our national interests are at stake," says Mirwais Yasini, head of the Counter-Narcotics Directorate in Kabul. "We're facing anarchy."

The Taliban's Revival
The country's disorder, U.S. and Afghan officials say, has been a boon for the Taliban. The regime's leadership survived U.S. bombs in 2001, retreating to border towns in Pakistan. From there, the mullahs reconstituted their military chain of command and tasked followers to form bombmaking and sabotage cells, according to a NATO source. A senior American official says the U.S. has encountered the most resistance from resurgent Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in the Zabul province near Kandahar. Their fighters move in groups of 15 to 20 and avoid attention. Their aim: to kill anyone cooperating with U.S. forces. "They are smart," says the official.

And now they are raising the stakes. Two months ago, the Taliban claimed responsibility for two suicide bombings that killed a Canadian and a British soldier. Last week, just the day before Karzai declared the Taliban "defeated," five members of an Afghan nonprofit group were shot dead by suspected militants. In Spin Boldak, a dusty smugglers' crossroads in southeastern Afghanistan, the Taliban have launched four major ambushes from Pakistani hideouts against Afghan government outposts over the past nine months, killing dozens. Abdul Raziq, the pro-U.S. garrison commander in Spin Boldak, says he has received intelligence from tribal allies in border towns like Chaman that the Taliban are gearing up for a major guerrilla campaign. "They are coming," he says. "It's only a matter of time."

Their goal, Afghan military officials say, is to capture small districts in Afghanistan's lawless hinterlands from which they can harass the U.S. and its allies. "They haven't yet secured bases in the cities to begin operations," says General Khan Mohammed, a corps commander in Kandahar. "But in the rural areas they are back."

Afghan security officials complain that their Pakistani counterparts continue to tolerate—and even encourage—militancy by the Taliban, which Pakistan's intelligence service, the isi, helped create in the mid-1990s in a bid to make Afghanistan a client state. At the highest levels, Pakistan's Establishment remains "nostalgic" for the Taliban, says a Western diplomat. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has cooperated in the hunt for al-Qaeda's top officials but has shown less enthusiasm for rooting out the Taliban. Until Pakistan's security services stop sheltering Taliban leaders, U.S. officials say, Afghanistan will never be free from the threat of their return.

U.S. intelligence officials in Washington told TIME that the U.S. possesses satellite photos that purportedly show Pakistani army trucks picking up Taliban troops fleeing back across the border after a failed attack. After the U.S. confronted Pakistani officials with the photographs, signs of visible Pakistani aid to the rebels ceased. U.S. and Afghan officials say the U.S. has also provided Islamabad with specific locations of two dozen suspected Taliban hideouts in the tribal badlands. But so far no fugitives have been arrested.

Will the U.S. Stay The Course?
No one is more cognizant of the threats to the future of Afghanistan than the 11,000 U.S. soldiers who call its deserts and redoubts home. Deployed at the front line of Washington's war on terrorism, the U.S. commanders believe they have the enemy on the run even if bin Laden remains at large. "I don't think we're facing 'good' al-Qaeda," says Lieut. Colonel Mike Howard, who commands the 10th Mountain Division's two bases at Orgun-e and Shkin, referring to the battle-tested brigades that faced off against the U.S. forces when they first arrived. "I wouldn't have said that two years ago." Members of the 10th Mountain Division who have returned to Afghanistan for their second tour of duty say the change is noticeable. "It's a different environment today from what it was then," says Lieut. Colonel Bentley. "We might be treading water, but we're not sipping air through a straw like before."

While they sound upbeat, the commanders are worried that one catastrophic event—like an attack on Karzai, who will be campaigning outside Kabul this spring—could shatter the current fragile peace. The U.S. military presence in Afghanistan remains the only guarantor that the country will not fall apart. "If we left," says a U.S. official, "Karzai would be dead within days." So the troops are staying—and attempting, at least, to kick-start the reconstruction of a country the U.S. has now effectively inherited.

Is it enough to get Afghanistan back on its feet? Marine General James Jones, the military chief of NATO, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January that while the insurgents pose little military threat to allied forces, the U.S. and its allies do not have enough troops in Afghanistan to carry out reconstruction tasks, train a new Afghan army and hunt terrorists. The light footprint means fewer American troops have been put at risk, but it has left the U.S.'s Afghan allies even more exposed to danger. After U.S. patrols retreat to their firebases, Afghans say, the Taliban creep back into villages to murder collaborators, usually local policemen. "We are helpless," says Mansour Mehboob, a police chief in an outpost along the Kunar River in Afghanistan. "We have only the bullets in our [guns], nothing more. And the enemy is all around us."

That should be enough to keep U.S. forces in Afghanistan for years—if only because the enemy is the same one that attacked on Sept. 11. But the war in Iraq has strained the military's resources and soured portions of the U.S. public on the virtues of open-ended military interventions. In Afghanistan, many believe that the Taliban and their sympathizers are betting they need only wait until the U.S.'s patience runs out. The military leaders, if not the political ones, remain conscious of that possibility. "We don't have to win," says Howard, the commander of the Orgun-e firebase. "We just have to not lose." And the game is a long way from being over.

With reporting by Michael Duffy and Mark Thompson/Washington