Peace threatened in Afghanistan

At weekly meetings in Kabul, Afghan intelligence officials share their information with US military counterparts. But the two allies are fighting very different strategies in the same war. Afghan spies work to protect the capital, and key points along the border. American forces work with local warlords to deny Al Qaeda and its supporters a base of operations within Afghanistan.

"There are good reasons from an operational standpoint for working operations with local warlords, instead of with central Afghan authorities from Kabul," says Lt. Col Roger King, spokesman at Bagram air base near Kabul. "We do coordinate with the central Afghan army here in Kabul, but we don't do coordination at the local tactical level just for operational security reasons."

Occasionally, these different strategies lead to disagreements of just where the enemy is. Khan says that the top Taliban leaders are not in Zormat; they are living near the Pakistani city of Quetta. And Osama bin Laden is not in Zormat either; he's in the Afghan province of Konar, where only a few hundred US special forces are based.

"They are inside this country. Our reports are 100 percent sure that they are along the eastern border, in Konar Province," says Khan, who manages the day-to-day intelligence-gathering operations of Amniat throughout the country.

Khan's allegations, that Al Qaeda has regrouped and is working with apparent cooperation from some pro-Islamist elements in the Pakistani military, are mirrored by recent comments of top Al Qaeda spokesman, Suleiman Abu Ghaith, during an interview with the Middle East Broadcasting Company. Khan's claims also confirm Afghan military intelligence reports, reported by the Monitor last month, that Al Qaeda was stepping up its activities in Afghanistan's remote Konar Province.

Khan says that the US is being misled both by its Afghan warlord allies, and by its other main partner in the war on terrorism, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI).

Yet, like the US, even some of Afghanistan's top leaders question the motives of Amniat and other Afghan military intelligence agencies.

Throughout its more than 120-year history, Afghanistan's intelligence service has generally worked for the narrow political interests of whatever person or political party is in power. Starting with King Abdur Rahman in 1881, the agency changed allegiances every time a new party took power. Serving the monarchy, then the socialists, then the Soviets, then the Islamic guerrillas, and the Taliban, the feared Khedmat Amniat Daulati, or KhAD, rarely had to change its staff.

Now the agency is headed by Engineer Ali, a former commander for the Tajik-led Northern Alliance. Diplomats say that the alliance receives much of its funding now from Russia and Iran, two countries with different foreign policy goals from the US.

"I don't know if it was good for the national interests or not, but KhAD was good for the communists," says Mir Haider Muttaher, editor of Arman-I Milli, a Persian language newspaper in Kabul. "Personally, I don't think anyone takes care about the national interests these days, just the interests of the political parties. I hope and pray that this changes soon, because this government is a broad-based government of many parties."

• Staff writer Howard Lafranchi contributed to this story.

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