Portrait of an Al Qaeda camp

Locals call Sabila "the lonely village."

"There are no children, no women, no relatives to celebrate Eid [the Islamic feast day] with," says Mohammad Nasser, a shopkeeper from Asadabad, Afghanistan, who has visited Sabila.

The village, just 10 miles across the border in Pakistan, is a collection of high-walled adobe compounds that house a brigade of 300 Al Qaeda fighters who are preparing to attack the Kabul government and US forces, say local Afghans and Afghan intelligence sources.

"Sabila is not a village anymore, it's a training camp for Al Qaeda, and they are a danger both for us and for the US forces." says Mr. Nasser. His own village is three miles from Sabila.

The fighters, who speak Arabic and appear to be mostly Arabs - with a smattering of Uzbeks, Africans, and Pakistanis - keep an extremely low profile, say Afghans who have visited Sabila. They hire Pakistanis from nearby villages to do their grocery shopping and other odd jobs. But there is one job these fighters prefer to do themselves: At least once a week, these Al Qaeda members travel across the mountains to Afghanistan and fire rockets on a US base near Asadabad, in Konar Province.

Loosely called "training camps" by Afghan and US military authorities, Sabila and perhaps a dozen well-defined and named outposts like it along the 1,500-mile Afghan-Pakistani border present the thorniest of problems for US forces, Afghan allies, and Pakistani federal authorities, who have pledged to rout terrorist groups on Pakistani soil.

The problem, US military spokesmen say, is that such villages are located in a legal gray area outside of the control of all three governments. Because they're deep enough into Pakistani territory, US and Afghan forces cannot attack them under the rubric of self-defense, or even "hot pursuit." But because they are in Pashtun tribal areas, where Pakistani federal authorities exert little direct control, foreign fighters enjoy profound popularity, as well as tacit support from local tribal and religious leaders.

"We're in a classic low-intensity conflict, and that's where you really have to be sure of your targets," says Col. Roger King, spokesman for US military forces at Bagram Air Base near Kabul.

"We work closely with the Pakistani forces on the border. And the primary thing we ask you to remember is that coalition forces reserve the right to self-defense and that can also relate to a border. You should be able to extrapolate from that that 10 miles probably does not constitute self-defense."

In the past, when US forces became aware of a concentration of Al Qaeda forces, such information was passed up the chain of Central Command, and dealt with either by allied Pakistani forces alone or with the assistance of US agents based in Pakistan. But the problem is not a dearth of such tipoffs, Colonel King says - it is deciding which of the hundreds of tipoffs are true, in a society where tribes often settle scores by labeling their rivals Al Qaeda.

"We're really having to deal with this debate of what is truth," says King, "especially when it comes to who do you go and put lethal force against."

If the reports of Nasser and other villagers are true, then Pakistan's support for the US-led war on terrorism would appear to be in serious doubt, at least at the local level.

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