Attacks rally Taliban's confidence, supporters

PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN

The banter on the bus rumbling through the Afghan countryside from Kabul to the Logar province is friendly.

Hanging casually from a strap is an Arab commander who says he has just left an underground Taliban military complex in the Afghan capital. With US jets scouring the region, he cracks a smile at the chiding suggestion from several passengers that he maybe ought to be hiding from the Americans. He reaches over and pats his firearm. "The only thing they'll capture is my dead body," he boasts.

Rather than demoralize the Taliban, say analysts in Peshawar, Pakistan, the US bombing is so far bolstering Afghan internal support for the Islamic rulers and their Al Qaeda associates, which

had begun to falter in recent years.

"The air campaign has given the Taliban a false sense of optimism, but it has also rallied the population around them," says Shamim Shaheed, bureau chief of the The Nation newspaper in Peshawar, who still has good contacts inside Afghanistan. "The Arabs, who are often in leadership positions, set the tone. Afghans know that the Arabs are not just full of hot air. They are genuinely prepared to be martyred for their cause."

Taliban and Al Qaeda movements on the ground over the past week suggest that embattled forces inside the country are advancing preparations for an extended struggle. Mules and horses can be seen winding through steep paths, loaded with heavy guns and ammunition destined for desolate mountain peaks.

Arab fighters in fresh, new uniforms scramble through the doors of civilian homes and small shops of Kabul as US jets scream overhead. During a lull in the US-led bombing, religious students scurry to stack ammunition cases into the trunk of a yellow taxi.

Bolstered by early optimism that they can stand up to the US onslaught, the Taliban regime has emptied arms caches and is now handing out weapons to the mostly Pashtun civilian population. Pakistani military analysts say that this is a sign of the Taliban's growing confidence in their own support base.

At the Logar airfield, 30 miles south of Kabul, a young villager, Salim, walks in an onion field cradling a new firearm, which he was handed just a day earlier by Taliban officers. His new weapon includes a grenade-launcher beneath its barrel. "The Taliban want me to patrol the mountain peaks around the Arab camp here at Kunjak," he says, trudging off to take up his military detail.

In Washington, Defense Department officials repeat that their objectives are to break the Taliban's grip on power and to capture Osama bin Laden and his associates by striking at the heart of the Afghan regime's military strength.

Those efforts may eventually succeed. But for now, the Afghan regime and its supporters are displaying an esprit de corps driven by steadfast religious beliefs and an intimate knowledge of guerrilla tactics.

Even the idea of surrendering major cities to US-led ground troops does not appear to phase many of the Taliban's top commanders. Maulvi Jalaluddin Haqqani, commander-in-chief of the Taliban's southern command, recently in Peshawar, told The News, a Pakistani daily: "Remember that the Soviets also controlled several major Afghan cities once. What happened to them?" Mr. Haqqani is a former anti-Soviet mujahideen fighter who is believed to be Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar's top military strategist.

Page: 1 | 2