Taliban spy chief mulls next step

Saidullah Haneefee's turban is gone. So is the Taliban regime he served as a regional head of the Taliban's much feared intelligence agency.

Now, Mr. Haneefee is faced with a dilemma. In his homeland of Afghanistan, he is a wanted man, a prominent figure in the Taliban government. But here in Pakistan, where he has spent the past three days, he can do nothing to secure the safety of his family, his two wives and four young boys.

As such, he is heading back home to Jalalabad to face almost certain capture and even death at the hands of the Northern Alliance troops who consider him a brutal war criminal.

"We don't have any safe place for my family; nobody would accept them now," he says, sitting on a simple cot in a friend's apartment in a working-class section of Islamabad. "I was a key person in the Taliban regime, as communications director and now intelligence director. Now it's a very big problem for me, and I don't know what will happen with my family, because I'm here. I have no other choice. I must go."

In the waning days of the Taliban, it had already become apparent that personal, financial, and family concerns had become the chief preoccupation for many Taliban officials. Just days after the Sept. 11 attack, for instance, the governor of Nangrahar province was arrested by a local Taliban commander for attempting to ferry his wife and children out of Afghanistan in a hired van. His offense wasn't treason; it was timing. Many Taliban leaders had sent their families to Pakistan years ago, long before the Oct. 7 air campaign began.

Now, with the Taliban regime in chaotic retreat from most of the main cities of Afghanistan, Pakistani officials are bracing for a flood of Taliban leaders like Haneefee, who belongs to the same Pashtun ethnic group that populates much of northern Pakistan.

But family and ethnic ties are sending some Taliban officials, like Haneefee, directly into harm's way, where the public mood has turned sharply against them. For these men, family and tribe and tradition are the No. 1 part of an ethnic Pashtun's life - even more important than life.

Despite the Taliban's reduced circumstances, Haneefee is still proud of what they achieved.

"The Taliban had two important missions: to bring peace and to bring fresh and 100 percent Islamic laws," he says. "We succeeded with the first one, but the people weren't ready for such hard Islamic laws. No other Afghan government has done this before. When anyone is a thief, his hand is cut off. When anyone kills someone, he is killed. If you follow Islam 100 percent, you have to work hard, and the people weren't ready."

Like many Taliban, Haneefee had mixed feelings about the increasing power of Arab nationals in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Many Taliban say that in the final days, the Arabs had as much power, if not more, than the Taliban who were their hosts.

Page: 1 | 2