Terrorists traces left in Kabul

A bomb-making laboratory found in a residential house is part of a growing body of evidence emerging in the Afghan capital, Kabul, about the global magnitude of terrorist activities here.

The compound is one of at least 10 Al Qaeda houses abandoned this past week when the radical Islamic Taliban and Osama bin Laden's "foreign legion" of Arab and Pakistani fighters fled. What they left behind is a fast-disappearing trail of evidence that's being scooped up by journalists, Northern Alliance soldiers, and even Kabul residents foraging for heating fuel.

"The Americans were asleep on this one," says Anthony Davis, an Afghanistan expert with the London-based Jane's Defense Weekly, who has examined some of the abandoned Al Qaeda documents in Kabul.

"They should have had US Special Forces units detailed to those places, or at least had the Northern Alliance lock them up and guard them. Instead, the press corps is doing their job for for them, in a very haphazard way. It is not a great day in the annals of American and British intelligence."

At this house on a Kabul side street, on the second floor, behind two white-painted reinforced doors and strewn among scrawled hard-line religious tracts, are bomb-making materials that underscore Afghanistan's role as a lead exporter of terrorism .

"Learn how to use these things," instructs one page of a hand-written student exercise book, in Arabic. Wires in the diagram below lead to boxes labeled "TNT."

In addition to diagrams for making explosive and safety fuses and a variety of chemical compounds and grenades, there are circuit boards, makeshift timing devices using the guts of wristwatches, transistors, resistors, and LED lights, and tangles of wire.

Visits to many of the houses in Kabul used by some of an estimated 10,000 foreign Al Qaeda operatives - known simply as "Arabs" to unsympathetic local Afghans - provide a glimpse into the secretive world of militants here who declare that killing Americans is a sacred duty.

"This gives us very clear and overwhelming evidence of the high level of sophistication and global reach of this group," Mr. Davis says. "There is no way the men who came here from around the planet were going to go back home the same people. In terms of technical experience and radicalization, this place is a forging ground."

If the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on Sept. 11 had not sparked the current US operation in Afghanistan - and the subsequent collapse of the Taliban - "this hotbed of militant and terrorist training would have continued on its merry way indefinitely," Davis says.

One house reportedly yielded documents about rudimentary nuclear physics, thermonuclear explosions, missile designs, and biological weapons in Arabic, German, Urdu, and English, according to The Times of London. Another had Microsoft flight-simulator software and a list of American flight schools torn from "Flying" magazine, notes The New York Times.

Outside the city of Jalalabad, an apparent chemical weapons factory contains texts and manuals dedicated to Mr. bin Laden. The walls are lined with bottles of acetane, lead acetate, nitric acid, carbolic acid, glycerin, and other chemicals. About a dozen gas masks are scattered on the floor. The factory is in a remote former-Soviet military base along the Kabul River. Flush with rusted Soviet vehicles and artillery pieces, the base was converted nearly a decade ago into a training base eventually used by Al Qaeda. In one bunker, heavily bombed in recent weeks, lie diaries abandoned by fighters. One entry reads: "Oh, Osama, we will defend you until death comes upon us."

Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar recently was quoted as saying his "big cause" is the destruction of the US. "The plan is going ahead and, God willing, it is being implemented," Mr. Omar said. The Taliban has been the first target of Washington's declared war against terrorism, for its refusal to hand over the Saudi-born bin Laden and top members of his Al Qaeda network. If any proof were needed, their symbiotic ties are evident in several houses.

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