Lying low in 'Taliban country'
As the US hunt for Al Qaeda continues, Afghans are reluctant to help, for fear of being abandoned.
The tribal chiefs say they haven't seen a foreigner here for years, but they insist that they're dying to take an American hunting in the hills outside of town. That is where US Black Hawk helicopters are already whipping through snow-covered mountain passes, occasionally dropping off a platoon for a quick - usually fruitless - search mission.
But, unlike the US troops, the Pashtun tribesmen aren't after lingering Al Qaeda cells; they're anxious to take well-heeled foreigners hunting for bighorn ram and deer.
The citizens of Moqor have run up the Afghan king's flag here at the royal family's 100-year-old hunting lodge in the heart of what is still, by most accounts, "Taliban country" and are rolling out the red carpet for just about any visitor who drops in.
Senior military and civilians in the provincial capital, Ghazni, say that Afghanistan's remaining Taliban leaders and their Al Qaeda "guests" have recently settled into the hills of southern Ghazni and all of Zabul province. Apart from having to dodge the occasional Black Hawk raid, they are living unobtrusively alongside the people they turned a few of their heavy weapons over to.
Some of the locals are more enthusiastic about the monarchy than others, but here in Moqor, the "king's men" have taken up residence at the hunting lodge. The decrepit Victorian mansion is where King Zahir Shah, 28 years absent from his homeland, would always stop to hunt whenever he traveled between Kabul and Kandahar, say the tribesmen.
As for the other hunt in town - the search for Al Qaeda - tribal leaders interviewed say it's none of their business - at least for now. Their attitudes are commonplace across a vast swath of Afghanistan, from Khost province in the East to Kandahar province in the South, where Pashtun tribesmen say they don't want to spark a civil war by pressing the hunt for members of the terror network.
Eid Mohamad, the local security chief in Moqor, says: "If the US military wants to, they can come here and search and arrest the culprits, but this is not my duty. I'm the security chief for my people, not the Taliban and the Arabs." As he speaks, a pair of Black Hawk helicopters zipped down the valley and disappeared behind a hill shaped like the back of a crouching camel.
The security chief and others say there are other factors that argue against local Afghans joining in the hunt.
Tribesmen - even warlords sympathetic to Washington's interests - fear that they'll be abandoned if the US leaves the job half-done.
Commander Ismail Khan in Ghazni (not to be confused with the commander by the same name in the country's far west, who has strong links with Iran) is so proud of his cooperation with the US Special Forces and the CIA that he calls himself "an American soldier." Along with a small group of his own fighters, he freed seven international Christian aid workers from their Taliban captors last year. Since his heroic efforts, however, he hasn't been on any major Al Qaeda or Taliban raids in Ghazni.
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