Clerics Sending Youth To Afghanistan Said In Fear Of Public Anger.

[MohammedA]

If this is true then I am really sickened by these people and so-called leaders. I think this is one of the saddest and most sickening posts I have ever had to make. This sufi, and Maulvis Diesel, Sandwich, and Qazi are already under sedition charges, now they have to also be held responsible for sending thousands across the border against strict GOP advice to be killed for their own politics and personal advantage. They have done enough damage to Pakistan, now is the time to finish their mischief for good. IF BB and NS can be put on trial, then so can these "leaders".



CLERICS SENDING YOUTH TO AFGHANISTAN SAID IN FEAR OF PUBLIC ANGER.


Text of report by Pakistani newspaper Ausaf on 21 November

Dir Bala: More than 2,700, out of a total of 9,000 fighters of Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Shariat are missing in Afghanistan. Hundreds of these people, from Wari, Maidan, Sheringal and Buner areas have been killed in the fighting. However, the fighters who have not been killed are also missing.

Those fighters who returned to Pakistan, have developed serious hatred and indignation against the Taleban and the Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Shariat. They said that the Taleban considered the Pakistani volunteers as their enemies. These persons added that at many places, the Taleban had snatched arms and cash from the Pakistani volunteers, and those resisting were killed; the Afghans killed a large number of Pakistani fighters.

Meanwhile, all the commanders of Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Shariat, including its supreme commander, Mahmood Jan, have safely returned to Pakistan. Some of the leaders of this group are still in Laghray, in Bajawar agency, and they cannot return to their homes out of the fear of public rage, as "these leaders returned from Afghanistan safely after plunging the people into the war."

Maulana Sufi Mohammad courted arrest along with his 30 close aides because he feared the danger of being killed on his return to his area. The local people are angry that there are no reports about the fate of the people sent by Maulana Sufi Mohammad to Afghanistan. They demanded the government to bring Maulana Sufi Mohammad and all other leaders of Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Shariah to justice and punish them.

Source: Ausaf, Islamabad, in Urdu 21 Nov 01 pp1,7.
BBC Worldwide Monitoring/ (c) BBC 2001.

[osman]

Like we have always said, these wothless so called leaders are the real criminals, they send of emotional youths into a jihad which is not a jihad for their own personal gains. But it has to be said that these youths are also to be blamed for not listening to the gov. Being emotional and stupid should not be the same thing

[Wasif Rashid]

I think the GoP has given up on these unfortunates:

One of the first western reporters to reach Mazar-i-Sharif, I was ushered into the home of Ustad Atta Mohammed, the Northern Alliance commander who–along with warlords Rashid Dostum and Haji Mohammed Mohaqiq–had taken the city a few days before. An ethnic Tajik, Atta, 37, is a bearded giant given to joking and easy small talk. He invited me to sit on his carpet and share a meal of qabeli, the Afghan national dish of flee, raisins, mutton, carrots and onions, reports a Time correspondent. In the past week, he has established himself as the unofficial mayor of Mazar, presiding over meetings of tribal elders and hearing pleas for increased security. He and his men have the city, but as they consolidated control, they massacred 100 Pakistani Taliban fighters who were trying to surrender–and then watched as 12 of their own mullahs, on a peace mission to the Ta]iban resisters, were executed while clutching their holy texts. In retaliation, the Alliance soldiers then slaughtered the rest of the resisters.
As Atta and his security chief, Wasiq, described how Mazar had been taken, it became clear that this fighting had finished only hours before I arrived. They told me about Sultan Raziya, a girls’ school in the southeast part of the city, where Pakistani “tourists,” as they called them, had held out until late Tuesday. Reports of a massacre there had filtered out of Mazar the weekend before. “Many people died there,” said Wasiq. “We had to kill many.” I asked if I could visit the site. Wasiq smiled and said “I would have to get permission from Atta.”
As we approached Sultan Raziya the next morning, a Red Cross team was sifting the rubble and transferring bodies and pieces of bodies onto a flatbed tractor-trailer. The stench of death hung across the ruins. The team concentrated on intact bodies that could be lifted by the arms and legs. There had been more than 300 of them so far. With Atta’s permission, I was given free rein to climb through the rubble, stepping past corpse after corpse, many of them dismembered. Elsewhere, fire had reduced everything–furniture, clothing, people–to ash.
In interviews with Atta, Wasiq and dozens of their men and civilian eyewitnesses from the neighborhood around the school, I was able to piece together a full account of what happened.
On Friday, Nov. 9, the Taliban commanders of Mazar-i-Sharif abandoned the city, handing the Northern Alliance its first victory of the ground war. But there was no room in the Taliban’s high-powered pickup trucks for the 900 fighters they had brought across the country from Pakistan. In a pattern that was to be repeated in other besieged cities in the coming days, when Alliance troops entered, they found the streets of Mazar deserted except for pockets of foreign soldiers who had nowhere to run to. The Red Cross officials say they picked up 131 bodies around the city Saturday morning.
At Sultan Raziya, where the Pakistanis had set up their garrison, the soldiers refused to surrender. Alliance troops met a lethal volley of automatic-weapons fire from every side of the two-storey building. They called in American fighter-bombers– guided by spotters on the ground–which scored two direct hits on the front of the school Saturday afternoon. Windows were blown out a quarter of a mile away. Hundreds of Pakistanis died in the explosions.
The Pakistanis who had survived the air strike–bloodied, demoralised and realizing that their Taliban masters had abandoned them–debated whether to surrender. Eyewitnesses say that a crowd gathered outside the walls of the school compound, shouting at the Taliban soldiers to give themselves up. Others, mostly Shi’ite Muslims, demanded that Alliance troops revenge the Sunni Taliban takeover of the city three years before, when the Taliban marched some 6,000 people into the desert in groups of 50 or 60 and mowed them down with AK-47s.
Inside, the Pakistanis could hear the shouts• of “Kill the tourists!” But they shouted back that they were coming out to be arrested. Alliance soldiers waited until more than 100 had emerged, eyewitnesses say, then opened fire. Most of the Taliban soldiers were cut down as they walked. A handful fought back, scaled the walls and escaped into the city. The Alliance troops gave chase, shooting them as they ran through the streets and pursuing them into nearby houses. The Taliban took several families hostage; eyewitnesses said an unknown number died in the cross fire.
As dawn broke on Sunday, Red Cross workers began picking up the first of 80 bodies in the streets and homes around Sultan Raziya. The Alliance commanders turned their attention back on the school, where up to 600 Pakistanis were still barricaded inside. Throughout the day, there were sporadic exchanges of gunfire. On Monday, the Alliance commanders decided to allow 12 local mullahs to try to persuade the Pakistanis to surrender. In the afternoon the group approached the school armed only with copies of the Quran. “Surrender, surrender, surrender, brother Muslims!” they shouted. “Follow the book of peace!” Suddenly, automatic gunfire erupted from the shattered windows. The mullahs fell where they stood, clutching their holy books. “Now we had to kill them all,” says Atta’s ground commander, Saeed Mohammed Zaki, 30, surveying the schoolyard battlefield, his turban wrapped across his nose and mouth.
Advancing under a hail of fire on Monday afternoon, Alliance troops scaled the walls and ran to within a few yards of the building. From there, they fired a barrage of grenades in through the windows. After a few hours of fierce fighting, Alliance soldiers soaked the outside walls of the school with gasoline and ignited it. “The fires burned all night,” says a local resident. “I could see them from my house. We all shouted at the Pakistanis to surrender.” Adds Zaki: “We were able to kill or injure most of them. I don’t know why they kept fighting.” Some of the Pakistanis did run out of the building and did lay their weapons on the ground to be taken prisoner. But others were shot the moment they stepped outside. Losing patience as Tuesday came with the school still uncaptured, Dostum and Atta ordered their men to storm the building at all costs. So Alliance forces made a final ferocious push. In the afternoon, the guns inside fell silent, and Alliance troops entered what was left of the smoldering school. But the resistance still was not finished; when Red Cross workers began carting away the bodies on Wednesday, three injured Pakistanis hiding in a ditch outside the building opened fire. Alliance soldiers patrolling the area swiftly dispatched them. In all, Atta’s troops had taken 175 prisoners; Dostum’s, 150. The Red Cross said it had recovered close to 400 bodies from the burned-out building. Workers ferried the corpses, dusted in ghostly white, into the desert to be buried in mass graves. Mohaqiq’s force of ethnic Hazara Shi’ites, who had borne the brunt of the Taliban’s murderous rule, would not specify how many captives they took or what had happened to them. But some 200 of the 900 Taliban fighters remained unaccounted for.
Atta is keeping his prisoners locked in a former cotton warehouse on the southwestern outskirts of Mazar. There, the Pakistanis tell a uniform tale of deception. Mullahs in Pakistan told them Americans were fighting against brother Muslims in Afghanistan and that it was their duty to join the jihad. “The mullahs cheated us,” says Saeed Hanif Mohammed, 60, a member of the fundamentalist Pakistani militia Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. “A lot of people died, but we couldn’t care about them– we had to save ourselves.” He pauses. “I just want to go home.” The Northern Alliance guards say barefoot Mohammed Haji Meer, 55, was one of the Pakistani commanders. “All these people are Muslims,” he says, gesturing at his jailers. “Of course we regret coming here. The Taliban just left us–the people who wanted to fight thought they would be coming back”.
The prisoners take pains not to criticize their captors, who give them food, water and medicine–and have the power to execute them. “We don’t want to kill them,” says Atta. “But maybe some of them who killed people–we will have to kill them.”


COPYRIGHT THE NATION

[osman]

All the people who in any way be it taking part in demos or with money, encouraged these pakistanis to join the talibans in afghanistan are responsiple for their slaughter in afghanistan. Really it is sheer hypocracy when these peole cry when the americans bomb afghans but stay quiet when muslims are killing muslims in name of jihad. I have no words to desribe my anger on these munafiqeen. Where are all these leaders who sent these people into a war which was named as jihad and more.? well these people are sitting in their cosy drawing rooms smoking God knows what. Its time that we take stock of the situation and bring to an end to the power these people have on lives of youths which were sent to afghanistan. I can somehow also understand the anger the afghans have against these pakistani youths which were just prolonging the suffering of the common afghans by fighting on the side of the talibans, no wonder their is so much distrust among some sections of the afghan population, and they readly oversee the sacrifices the pakistanis as a nation have brought about for them.

[Maisum Ali]

Yeah, it's natural for afghans. They hate any foriegn forces in their country. I feel bad for the Pakistanis that were fooled into coming to Afghanistan.

I have no sympathy for the Mullahs. Sami ul Haq and people like Fazlur Rahman should be handed over to the Northern Alliance. That is what they deserve.

[Gulstan]

It doen't look good in Kunduz either, the Taliban have started surrendering in numbers, god help the non Afghan's. Ltes hope they make it to the hills. So much for the UN and American principles I hope for the day when the NA turns on these *******s adn they get what they deserve


16:06 THURSDAY NOVEMBER 22 2001

More fighting in 'surrendered' Konduz

BY AP IN KABUL

Taleban commanders agreed to surrender Konduz, their northern stronghold today, but then appeared to have reneged on the deal. While the Northern Alliance announced what they thought was a victory, fighting broke out in the city again.

Details of the supposed surrender agreement remained murky as troops from both sides returned to the front line. Shell fire and tank movement brought an end to the lull that had surrounded the discussions.

But in Mazar-i-Sharif, where the talks were held, negotiators maintained that a significant breakthrough had been reached.

Atta Mohammed, an alliance commander said: "We told them [the Taleban]: 'you are safe. We can transfer you to your provinces'. They have agreed to hand over the foreign fighters."

Konduz, the last Taleban stronghold in the north of country, has been surrounded by Northern Alliance forces for the past week, with the support of American air strikes.

Mohammed Daoud, a senior Northern Alliance commander, said the fighting broke out when Taleban forces - not knowing about the surrender agreement - tried to prevent about 200 of their fighters from surrendering to the Northern Alliance just east of Kunduz. Taleban leaders Noorallah Noori and Mullah Fazil had not yet returned from Mazar-i-Sharif with word of the agreement, Daoud said.

"They didn’t know," he said. "The negotiations had finished in Mazar-i-Sharif but they didn’t know about the result."

Earlier, at a news conference in the town of Spin Boldak near the Pakistani border, Taleban spokesman Syed Tayyab Agha vowed the Taleban would fight to the death in the provinces still under their control.


"They have decided to defend the presently controlled areas," he said. "We will try our best and we will defend our nation. We will not give any chance to anybody to disturb our Islamic rule in Kandahar and other provinces."

As the attack on Konduz continued, the Taleban fired their first mortar attack in days. Refugees ran for cover as they attempted to leave the city on foot. "The United States is bombing and people are escaping," said Mahmedi, a refugee, "the city is empty."

[MohammedA]

TALIBAN HOLDS MILITIAMEN'S FAMILIES HOSTAGE - STRATEGY DESIGNED TO PREVENT TROOPS IN KANDAHAR FROM ...


By Kamran Khan.
Taliban Holds Militiamen's Families Hostage - Strategy Designed to Prevent Troops in Kandahar From Surrendering or Defecting.

KARACHI, Pakistan, Nov. 22 - Three Pakistani militants just returned from Afghanistan said today that Taliban zealots and their foreign comrades, determined to fight to the finish, have detained the wives and children of hundreds of Afghan fighters in Kandahar to prevent them from surrendering or fleeing.

In an interview, the three said fighters' families are held in three heavily guarded residential compounds in Kandahar while their husbands and fathers are forced to swear on the Koran never to let opposition or U.S. forces enter the southwestern Afghan city, one of only two remaining in Taliban hands.
The three Pakistani fighters described the families' detentions as part of what one called "a reign of terror" inside Kandahar by Taliban leaders and their Arab partners from Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization. There was no way to confirm their account, although other travelers from the besieged city also have spoken of the determination of the most radical Taliban fighters and Arab associates, along with tension between them and Afghan fighters thinking of surrender.

Disillusioned, the three Pakistanis said they walked for four days through desert and hills to escape Kandahar and sneak back across the Pakistani border, in a trip that began last Friday and ended with a bus ride to Karachi on Wednesday. "We made a grave mistake by going there," said Abul Kalam, a 23-year-old dropout from the University of Karachi.

Recruited by a religious organization that preaches holy war against the United States as an Islamic obligation, Kalam and his two friends began their jihad, or holy war, in Afghanistan just days before U.S. airstrikes started on Oct. 7. Kalam and Rasheed Ahmed, 22, another University of Karachi dropout, were already committed fighters, along with Khalilullah, a 20-year-old graduate student at Karachi's S.M. Science College.

In early 1998, all three were trained in guerrilla warfare by Arab experts at a camp near the eastern Afghan town of Khost, they said. And all three said they had experience fighting the Indian army in the disputed province of Kashmir. Last month, they joined with what Pakistani security officials described as thousands of other Pakistanis, most of them from the Pashtun-dominated tribal border areas, who streamed into Afghanistan in response to pleas from religious leaders to join the Taliban's battle.

"It was not the day and night American bombings, but the reign of terror unleashed by Arab fighters against unarmed Kandaharis that forced us to secretly abandon our security post near the ruined cantonment of the city," said Kalam. "God was kind to make me realize that it was sheer distortion of the concept of jihad."

All three said they decided to return to Karachi once they saw Arabs and some Taliban militia leaders forcing hundreds of fighters to take security positions at various locations in the city by confining their wives and children to three residential compounds near Kandahar's Chowk Maidan district.

"Mullah Omar lieutenants and Arabs have told these Taliban that they would only be allowed to meet their wives and children once the war is over," said Ahmed, referring to the Taliban leader, Mohammad Omar. "Jihad doesn't allow us to force Muslims to fight by holding their families as hostage."
Rasheed said that soon after reaching Kandahar on Oct. 5, he was posted at one of these residential complexes by his commander, a former Pakistani army captain.

"From the beginning I was suspicious that this complex of about 70 houses had no adult male population, yet it was guarded to an extent that even the children were not allowed to wander outside the complex," he said. "Later some of the children and my fellow Arab guards told me that the families would only meet their adult male members once the infidel America is defeated."

Rasheed said that because he showed some sympathy toward the confined women and children, he was moved to a security post near the Kandahar cantonment. Kalam said he had been assigned to a security post at a complex of 90 houses reserved for women and children about a 10-minute drive from downtown Kandahar.

"I was horrified to learn how Arabs stormed the houses of common Taliban to segregate women and children from the adult male members two days before the U.S. strikes," said Kalam.

"A paranoia that every second man in Kandahar is providing information to Americans has gripped Arab guerrillas," said Khalilullah.

He said he immediately decided to join his friends in their return journey to Karachi when last Friday he saw an Arab firing squad of three people killing a 16-year-old boy for carrying a toy pager that the Arabs mistook for a spy gadget.
Khalilullah said he was present at a gathering of about 200 Taliban two weeks ago during which several Arabs passed the Koran from one man to the next, asking them to swear an oath that they would fight to the death before allowing any foreign army to enter Kandahar.

Khalilullah was assigned to a mobile security team headed by an Arab, who openly spoke of his frustration at not being able to return to Egypt. Khalilullah said the Arab commander, known as Abu Furqan, told him, "You can go back to Pakistan, but I have no travel document. They will send me to gallows once they spot me in Cairo, the city of my birth."

Khalilullah said that while he and two colleagues were extremely lucky in making a safe journey from Kandahar to Karachi, thousands of Pakistani fighters are still in Afghanistan in the Taliban-held cities of Kandahar in the south and Kunduz in the north.

Some would like to leave, he said, but many others plan to stay until the end.
Copyright 2001, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved
http://www.washingtonpost.com/.

[MohammedA]

PAKISTAN'S JIHAD FERVOR REPLACED BY RESENTMENT.


By KIM MURPHY, TIMES STAFF WRITER.
TALASH, Pakistan - LEAD: Mohammed Youssef tried to stop it, first calling the local religious leader on the phone, then following his convoy of young jihad recruits into Afghanistan and confronting him in person. Don't take them, Youssef said. They're just boys. They don't know how to fight. If it gets bad, they don't know how to run.
"I personally talked to Sufi Mohammed twice and requested him not to go to Afghanistan with the large number of young people, all untrained," Youssef, a 55-year-old veteran of the Afghan war with the Soviets, said over the weekend. " 'Don't kill them,' I asked him. But he did not listen to me, and he refused."
After the U.S.-led bombing campaign in Afghanistan began eight weeks ago, young Pakistani men from the deeply religious border region were clamoring for the chance to fight with the Taliban. In this small farming village in the northwest frontier, more than 60 youths joined thousands of others who followed Mohammed, charismatic founder of the fundamentalist Movement for the Enforcement of the Laws of Muhammad, across the rugged frontier to take up arms.

A few weeks later, the Taliban was in substantial retreat, reports of Pakistani fighters being slaughtered were emerging, and Mohammed slipped quietly back across the border. Of the 60 jihadis who left with him from Talash, fewer than 25 have returned.
"It's a tragedy," Shansur Rehman, whose 23-year-old son was confirmed dead near Jalalabad, Afghanistan, said with a shrug.
The battle fervor that swept this region at the beginning of the war has largely evaporated, as thousands of foreign volunteer fighters-many of them Pakistani-were left in the gun sights while the Taliban leadership slipped back into its native landscape or retreated to Kandahar, the regime's southern Afghan stronghold.
In these frontier communities, where the mullahs have always had more pull than the government, there is a deepening resentment of the religious leaders who called away so many young men to a certain death.
"They went to Afghanistan to fight Americans, and they ended up fighting their fellow Muslims," said Sher Zameen, whose uncle, a farmer with six children, left for Afghanistan without a gun. He hoped he'd get one when he arrived, Zameen said. Now he is missing.
"In the initial stages, people were emotional, and everyone wanted to go to Afghanistan to fight. But then when people heard about the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif, people started feeling sick," said Faizal Hassan, whose father is missing in Afghanistan. More than 1,500 Taliban fighters were killed in the Northern Alliance's siege of the city and a prisoner revolt two weeks later, prompting calls for an international investigation of each incident.
"Now, people are criticizing Sufi Mohammed," Hassan said. "He ordered his followers to go to Afghanistan without any long-term planning. Without planning, without strategy, they sent laymen to Afghanistan to fight the Americans, and the result now is people are missing."
The intra-Muslim fighting that has occurred over the past several weeks in Afghanistan now threatens to spill into Pakistan. Limited clashes have already broken out between tribes that faced each other in Afghanistan, and several border communities have for the first time evicted Afghan refugees.
Government Blamed for Letting Youths Go
Accusations are spreading across the country. Commentators alternately blame the government, for allowing thousands of its citizens to take up weapons and cross the border, and the Islamic political parties, whose call for jihad, or holy war, represented a direct challenge to President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's pledge to aid the U.S. war effort against the Taliban and the Al Qaeda terrorist network.
"The romanticization of jihad was the gift of small minds to Pakistan," newspaper columnist Muhammad Ali Siddiqi said last week. "Lacking any real understanding of the intricacies of a modern war, these parties presented to the raw minds of Pakistani boys a jihad that was fun.... Now, they are holed up in the barren vastness of Kandahar, waiting for death, while those who urged them to jihad and turned them into cannon fodder have confined their own part in jihad to issuing press statements and observing black days."
The Pakistani government has arrested Sufi Mohammed on charges of possessing illegal weapons. But it has denied reports that it sent planes to evacuate Pakistani fighters from Afghanistan. Indeed, those rumors may have been wishful thinking more than anything else. The reality, say analysts in Islamabad, the capital, is that Pakistan, facing years of sectarian violence at the hands of Islamic extremists, was probably no more eager than the U.S. to see volunteer jihadis repatriated from Afghanistan.
In Talash, returning fighters gave dispiriting accounts of a war in which they expected to encounter American troops, but instead encountered confusion, retreat and the gun barrels of fellow Muslims.
Sardar Daud, 20, said he decided to join the fight after listening to appeals from the local mosques. "The religious leaders were giving sermons in the mosques to condemn the [U.S.] attacks and urging people to go to Afghanistan," he said. "Jihad is part of our faith. It's compulsory for any Muslim, and when you refuse to take part in jihad, it means you are not a Muslim."
Daud said he entered Afghanistan with 700 other Pakistanis and camped for a few days at the border with Mohammed. "He issued some directives. He recited a few verses of the holy Koran to highlight the importance of jihad for Muslims. Then we started moving toward Jalalabad."
But by the time they got there, U.S. airstrikes were hitting the area fiercely, and the Taliban arranged transport the next morning to Kabul, the Afghan capital. From there, Daud and 1,500 other fighters were taken to the front line in the Panjshir Valley.
"We took positions. Somebody told me on the front line there is a trench where the Northern Alliance and some foreign troops have taken positions. We planned to attack this position. For one thing, we wanted to kill those foreign troops. For another, we wanted to get some food, because we were short of food."
'Nobody Told Us' How War Would Be
The Taliban commander switched sides, and a new commander ordered them to abandon their positions only minutes before U.S. planes started hitting them, Daud said. He and his comrades walked five straight days back to the Pakistani border, and eventually home. Now, he wonders what he accomplished.
"We had an idea that some foreign troops, some American troops and British troops, were in Afghanistan. We wanted to capture some American troops-it would be a great honor for us to capture a U.S. Army man. But when we entered the area, we never saw any foreigners. They were all Muslims. They were all Afghans. And nobody told us about the airstrikes, this carpet bombing."
In the town of Rustam, also along Pakistan's northwest frontier, 28-year-old Pir Mohammed said he and nine others joined Sufi Mohammed and were outfitted with Kalashnikov rifles, rocket launchers, hand grenades and machine guns. "We had some missiles also, and small cannons, but due to logistical problems, we couldn't transport them," he said.
The weapons were leftover American supplies from the war with the Soviets in the 1980s, said his friend, Hafez Izhar Ahmed, 20.
Determined Fighters Lacked Directions
Once they got to Jalalabad, those with military training went on to Mazar-i-Sharif, while those who didn't stayed behind to learn how to load, unload and fire a weapon. Pir Mohammed stayed on for training but was evacuated to Kabul when the Americans started bombing Jalalabad. "When we reached Kabul, the Taliban informed us they were conducting a strategic retreat. The Northern Alliance was on the way," he said.
"For every 500 or 600 Pakistanis, there was only one Taliban who gave us information on what we should do," he said. "People were still determined to defend Kabul, but we never saw any Taliban, we had no information on where to go, whether we should retreat, or where we should retreat to. Thousands of people were there."
Still, Mohammed said, no one despaired. "We left Pakistan to sacrifice our life. Our aim was that. So whatever happened was up to God. We never expected that we would come back alive to our homes."
Now that he's home, Mohammed doesn't rule out going back. Indeed, despite their disillusionment, most of these jihadis say they expect the Taliban to regroup in the mountains and fight a guerrilla war for years to come.
Mohammed Youssef, the old Soviet fighter, for all his reservations about sending untrained boys to the front, says he is ready to be part of the future battle. The coalition government about to be set up in Kabul will be nothing more than a puppet of the U.S., Youssef said, and jihadis in Pakistan are determined to join the Taliban to fight it.
"Our strategy is to wait until the Northern Alliance sets up a government in Kabul, backed by the U.S. and other Western countries," he said with a smile. "Then we will start our activities."

..CR: ..DP: ..HI: ..NA: ..PR: ..SM: ..SP: ..SL:.
EDITION: Home Edition
SECTION:
(c) The Times Mirror Company 2001.

[MohammedA]

MULLAHS INSIDE PAKISTAN SILENT AS SCALE OF DEFEAT SINKS IN.


By EDWARD LUCE IN QUETTA.
Pakistan's religious parties have gone uncharacteristically quiet. With hundreds of pro-Taliban Pakistani nationals slaughtered in Afghanistan over the past two weeks, the Islamist parties' decision to back their jihad against the west seems to have backfired.
Hundreds, probably thousands, of former Taliban soldiers are crossing the border into Pakistan's Pashtun-dominated border provinces, but Pakistani officials believe that the threat of mullah-inspired instability has passed.
Many of the former Taliban are Pakistani, and vow to continue their holy war against the west. But the religious parties have lost a great deal of credibility among their supporters, say observers.
"Most people were shocked by how easily the Taliban ceded ground to the Northern Alliance," says Khalid Mahmoud, an analyst at the Institute of Regional Studies in Islamabad. "The Taliban seemed to have abandoned the Pakistan volunteers to their fate".
Even in Quetta, capital of the border province of Baluchistan and probably the strongest base of pro-Taliban sentiment within Pakistan, anger about the war has turned into sullen resignation. Before the fall of Kabul two weeks ago, Quetta's regular Friday demonstrations would attract up to 20,000 protesters. Last Friday fewer than 200 turned up.
Much remains to be played out, especially in southern Afghanistan, where hardline Taliban commanders and Pakistani volunteers remain holed up in Kandahar. A repeat of the massacres that occurred in Mazar-e-Sharif and other parts of northern Afghanistan could still provoke a backlash in Pakistan.
Senior officials in Pakistan's military regime appear confident religious extremism in Pakistan is on the retreat. But many others believe the Islamist groups will live to fight another day. Husain Haqqani, former senior adviser to Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, the prime ministers who preceded the current military regime, says President Pervez Musharraf would be wrong to assume that the Taliban defeat will lead to the disappearance of religious extremism in Pakistan.
Gen Musharraf should take two further steps to achieve such an objective, says Mr Haqqani. First, crack down on the Islamist groups in the Indian-held portion of the divided territory of Kashmir. Second, promote political moderation by lifting the ban on Pakistan's parties.
Neither, he says, is likely: "Gen Musharraf justified his decision to abandon support for the Taliban by saying that Islamabad had no choice but to back the US-led coalition if it was to preserve its policy on Kashmir."
The general, who says he will remain president after elections next October, spurns mainstream political parties. The two-year-old regime remains dominated by technocrats and military officers. "If Gen Musharraf refuses to engage in the task of building a strong political centre-ground in Pakistan, then he gives room for the extremists to thrive," says Mr Haqqani.
For the moment, Pakistan's religious leaders remain under house arrest. One or two, including Sufi Mohammed, a religious firebrand based in the North-West Frontier province, who led thousands of Pakistani students into Afghanistan to assist the Taliban, have even been imprisoned. But people like Mr Mohammed still have a relatively free rein to indulge in cross-border activities in Indian-held Kashmir, says Mr Haqqani. As long as Pakistan's Kashmir policy retains its Islamist character, Gen Musharraf will be forced to rely upon religious groups to supply the volunteer "freedom fighters" that help sustain the struggle.
"There is a nexus between the Pakistan military and the religious groups which helped promote the Taliban in Afghanistan and which helped sustain the freedom struggle in Kashmir," says Mr Haqqani. "One part of that nexus was broken when Pakistan joined the US coalition. What will happen to the other? Is it possible to continue with only one arm?"
(c) Copyright Financial Times Group.
http://www.ft.com

[MohammedA]

PAPER SAYS AFGHAN OFFICIALS DEMAND RANSOM FOR RELEASING PAKISTANI CAPTIVES.


Text of report by Pakistani newspaper The Frontier Post web site on 4 December

Islamabad - Pakistani tribal notables working for return of pro-Taleban fighters, who went to Afghanistan [to] join the ranks of the extremist militia and were killed or captured, were taken aback when the new rulers of Nangarhar Province demanded hefty ransoms.

The Frontier Post can report that tribal elders from Pakistan's Upper Dir area, who contacted Nangarhar security chief Hazrat Ali for return of Pakistani youths or their bodies, were confronted with a demand of 500,000 rupees per person.

Several hundred youths from Upper Dir had followed Pashtun puritan Sufi Mohammad into Afghanistan to fight side by side with the Taleban against coalition forces. As the Taleban rule collapsed, Sufi Mohammad with several men returned to Pakistan. However, 800 to 900 youths from this area are still missing in Afghanistan. While many of them are presumed dead in fighting, many others are believed to be in captivity.

However, negotiations going on for the return of theses fighters or their bodies seem to have hit a snag in the ransom demand of the Nangarhar administration. Sufi Mohammad was arrested on his return to Pakistan, and has since been sent to jail for three years. Officials have said he is being kept in jail for his personal security, for relatives of the youths missing in Afghanistan are angry with him and might harm him.

Source: The Frontier Post web site, Peshawar, in English 4 Dec 01.
BBC Worldwide Monitoring/ (c) BBC 2001.

[majithia]

Most of the religious parties as is now clear what happened to hundreds of innocent people in Afghanistan, have become nuance and a liability for Pakistan.

In the present circumstances, should we expect any thing good out of these ugly baboons?

Our prerogative is that we have been unable to reject, ignore or eradicate this menace that has brought Pakistan to brink of disaster.

All these years they have mushroomed in Pakistan unchecked and this unchecked freedom has not been enough to rid them of their many bigoted attitudes and without these attitudes the distress of these idiots is almost impossible to understand.

It is the strangeness of these mullahs and their bigoted belief what will now separate the families of victims from them and to understand how far the attitudes of these people will diverge from the attitudes of these mullahs.

Getting to know them, about their attitudes, what they represent and where they come from, their fatalistic mindset should be an eye opener for families of the victims. They have brought us untold bloodshed, humiliation and intellectual stagnation, have enslaved our illiterate, poor and innocent population and left the Pakistani society polarized,fragmented and vulnerable.

Their narrow mindedness and built-in primitive habits diminished them intellectually and made them incapable to respond to what could have happened in Afghanistan.

A dialogue with them in the past has always reached a dead end and almost always decayed just like them.

Has this narrow mindedness gone unnoticed or has it ever been understood by Pakistan's social scientists?

This is fundamental to understanding their intellectual third-rateness, is the most startling fact about them that they offer no ideas about anything only their fanatic obsessions,their primitive, tribal styles to shove religion down our throats.

Majithia

[MohammedA]

Jang.com.pk

Fighting extremism at home

The writer is a former Senator and a former federal and provincial minister

smahmood@lhr.comsats.net.pk

To paraphrase Lincoln, the world will little note nor long remember the Taliban, but the impact of their fall on Pakistan has been quite profound. With their less than ceremonious ouster, all the bluster has gone out of our homegrown extremist elements. Remember how aggressive they were not too long ago? Preaching open revolt against the government, threatening a march on Islamabad, calling on the army to overthrow Musharraf. Now suddenly they are nowhere to be seen. They have melted away like a blob of ice in summer heat.

This sudden change in the fortunes of our extremists is more easily understood if one pays careful attention to the end game in Afghanistan. We always knew that there were some Pakistanis fighting alongside the Taliban but their actual number has come as a surprise. Hundreds, indeed thousands, have been captured or have died in Kunduz and Mazar-e-Sharif. Many others are still trapped in Kandhar. It appears that a veritable army of our countrymen were important players in the Taliban movement.

This is a bit of a surprise for the uninitiated. Everyone knew that some of our worst terrorist had taken refuge in Afghanistan. The Riaz Basras of this world had found a ready sanctuary over there under the protection of the Taliban. Whenever we asked for their return, we were rebuffed. These murderers now appear to have been the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There were many more who were using Afghanistan as a base for training in warfare. They were hardened cadres because they are putting up a better fight than the Taliban army.

These people were obviously the reserve strength of our extremist elements. If you know that you can call upon hundreds of trained men to fight for you, it gives you a great sense of power. Now, with more knowledge, one can easily understand the aggressive impulses of our extremists. They knew something that we did not. They had a reserve army, trained in warfare, ready to do their bidding. Their threats against the government were not without substance. They were ready to fight, if they had to fight.

Most of this has changed with the collapse of the Taliban. For one, hundreds of these trained fighters have been killed or captured. This is no small setback. It has broken the back of the extremist's reserve army. Second, the psychological impact of the unceremonious retreat by the Taliban has been immense. The emotional heat that accompanied all those slogans against the great Satan made some people believe that Taliban would emerge victorious. There was no logical foundation for this belief, but 'jazba' is often beyond logic. Taliban's defeat is a much-needed doze of reality for many of these people.

Third, Afghanistan is no longer a sanctuary. It is no longer possible to commit crimes in Pakistan and seek shelter in Afghanistan. Part of the reason why many of our campaigns against sectarianism failed in the past was precisely this. The killers were nowhere to be found. They were having rest and recreation in the hills of Jalalabad. Hopefully, this would no longer be possible. Afghanistan as a safe haven for bad eggs will be at an end.

These developments are having a serious impact on the extremist elements in Pakistan. They are on the back foot, almost in retreat. Their power on the ground has suffered a serious setback and most importantly their will has been broken. It is for this reason that you do not see any enthusiasms in their campaign against the government. Those who still remember the rhetoric after September 11 would not have failed to notice the profound change that has come in extremists' demeanour and behaviour.

I still remember with profound sadness some of the slogans that were mouthed by these elements. They said, Pakistan has never won a war and Afghans have never lost a war. This was a distortion of Afghan history and a terrible put down of our armed forces. It almost seemed as if their love for the Taliban transcended any love they had for Pakistan. This gives substance to the charge that for these people the elusive Ummah, elusive because it is hard to define it, took precedence over their own country.

It is clear then that the extremists in Pakistan are at their weakest today than they have been for a long time. We are often fond of quoting election statistics to portray them as a very small minority. They are indeed a small minority but their impact on direction of the country has been very significant. From TV programs, to official holidays, to the rituals of every ceremonial, the sensibilities of the extremists have been pandered to. It would not be wrong to say that since the last days of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, they have shaped the form and content of our public discourse.

There is an opportunity now to change all this. The government seems to recognise it because, from what we have been hearing, a plan is afoot to clip their wings. The obvious target is the madrassas, because they act as a nursery to create future extremists. This is not to decry religious education. Such an education is a must in an Islamic country but it has to be within certain parameters. We must not allow these madrassas to preach hatred against other sects or create divisions where none exist. Most importantly, these seminaries need to have a syllabus that caters to the world as well as to religious needs - Din or Dunya so to speak.

It is good that the government has decided to monitor foreign students in these institutions. While doing this, it is also important to monitor the source of funds for many religious leaders and the seminaries they head. More often than not these funds are coming from outside the country. There is a strong competition for these funds and many stratagems are used to attract them.

Among the Mullahs this has almost become a game. They have, often illegally, added rooms to the mosques to start religious school. Of all the places, this is most visible in Islamabad. The purpose of such additions is two fold. To increase their strength by having students to do their bidding and to compete for funds. There is a need to examine all this and as a first step stop the flow of foreign funds. Illegal constructions also need to be demolished. A mosque is honourable place of religious worship and should not be used for any other purpose.

While on the source of funds for extremist elements, the use of Zakat money also must be minutely examined. During the Zia years a deliberate effort was made to funnel these funds into specified mosques and towards specific religious leaders. Much of our extremism has been funded through public money. This is a shame and a terrible use of scarce resources. A hard look at all Zakat disbursements is necessary. Wherever it is going in the wrong direction, it must be stopped.

There are many other areas that need to be looked into. For a long time now we have had a law that prohibits the use of mosque loudspeakers other than for Azan and Khutba. This is a law that has never been observed. Governments have been afraid of taking on the mullah and thus have allowed the life of the ordinary people to be made hell by the indiscriminate use of loudspeakers. It is time that this law should be implemented with zero tolerance. Anyone saying a word beyond the permissible should be hauled up and proceeded against.

Needless to say, there is a strong need to enforce the law against illegal weapons. The de-weaponisation campaign needs to be focused and targeted. All seminaries giving military training to their followers need to be closed down. This country can ill afford armed militias that threaten the citizens and the state.

The extremists are down but not out. Once the dust has settled in Afghanistan, they will try a resurgence. The important thing is that the government must stay on the course. This is a historic opportunity to clean our body politic of dangerous elements. We must not miss it.

[MohammedA]

ANGER ERUPTS AS PAKISTANIS RETURN FROM FIGHTING.


By JOHN F. BURNS.

SWAT VALLEY, Pakistan - From this lush valley alone, a sinuous reach of sugar-cane fields and citrus groves that runs a morning's drive north of the old frontier city of Peshawar, villagers say 10,000 to 15,000 men marched off to Afghanistan to fight the United States in October, and 2,000 to 3,000 have not returned.
Defeat in the war against the United States has been bitter in this lovely corner of northwest Pakistan.
It has roused angry voices among thousands of Pashtun tribesmen who volunteered to fight with the Taliban, and bitter grief among families whose fathers and brothers and sons - some as old as 75, some as young as 13, many with old breech-loading rifles, muskets and pistols, and running shoes for boots - have not returned.
Precise figures on the numbers of volunteers, or jihadis, as they are known among Islamic militants, are impossible to find.
If anybody knows how many went, and how many may have died, it is the Islamic militant leaders who ignited religious passions with cries of "Jihad!" - or holy war - and then dispatched legions of untrained men and boys across the border to face the terrors of U.S. B-52 bombers and Tomahawk cruise missiles.
Like their kind down the ages, the militant leaders mostly stayed home, or crossed the frontier only long enough to declare themselves holy warriors before hastening back.
Many of these firebrands are in detention now, prisoners of a Pakistani government that has taken the debacle of the jihadis as an opportunity to tighten its crackdown on the militant groups so as to sever their hold on millions of the country's poor and illiterate.
In any event, these leaders - elderly men grown rich and pampered from their preachings, men who saw to it that their own sons and grandsons stayed out of the war - have powerful reasons now to disguise the extent of the miseries they caused.
While their deputies storm up and down the valley, calling meetings after Friday prayers to heap venom on the United States, many tribe members blame the disaster on the militant leaders, saying they sent the valley's sons to their deaths, and then did nothing to help the families left behind.
That has left the accounting to survivors and relatives of the missing. The figures they give, in village after village, checking lists of those who went and those have not come back, are woeful.
Talk to any jihadi who made it back, and he will list the names of those who are missing. "There is Ehsanullah, from Dara Ramora," one man said, his eyes filling with tears. "Then there's Salim, from Chakdara. And there's another Salim. He lived a little out from Chakdara. The ones who died were mostly young. They were 18 to 20 years old."
Some who made it back make a brave face of it, saying it was a glorious chance to "fight in the path of Allah" and vowing to "make jihad" again if asked, especially if the enemy is the United States.

Men like Bakht Wali - the name is a pseudonym, chosen after Islamic leaders threatened to kill followers caught talking to Western reporters - even say, without much conviction, that they wish they had fallen to the U.S. bombs and missiles, earning the reverential title of shahid, or martyr, bestowed on any Muslim who dies fighting for the faith.
Could these really have been the favored ones, a visitor asked his host, a man who gave his age as 47 but looked 10 to 15 years older, with a sun-wizened face and a proud, jutting salt-and-pepper beard at least 6 inches long, like the Taliban?
Bakht Wali smiled as he sat on a bed of woven rattan in the courtyard of a farmer's mud-walled home in Chakdara, perhaps because he knew his answer might sound false, after discussing the miserable deaths that some of those who went with him into Afghanistan almost certainly met.
"In the sight of Allah, the ones who died are the lucky ones," he said, "because they died fighting for his cause. And from my point of view too, they are the lucky ones, because they have gone to paradise now, with all the pleasures they have been promised in the Koran.
"Now they will have girls, and wine, and music, and all the things forbidden to them here on earth. Now they will be happy, as we who remain can never be here on earth."
Only later did the visitor learn that this man's pseudonym meant "man of sacred fortune" in Pashto, the language of 20 million to 30 million Pashtuns who straddle the old colonial border that divides modern Pakistan and Afghanistan - the ethnic group that made up the overwhelming majority of the Taliban, and of the volunteer legions who rushed from Pakistan to fight beside them.
Adopted after much bantering with his friends, the name suggested that they, at least, considered him fortunate not to have been killed.
The fundamentalist form of Islam espoused by the militant leaders, and turned into state policy by the Taliban, is a powerful weapon in these parts, made more so by poverty.
According to the families of the missing jihadis, few of them had ever had a job, and those who had rarely earned more than the equivalent of $1.20 for a day of backbreaking work in the fields, and that only in the planting and harvesting seasons.
Those men, in districts like Malakand, Mohmand and Dir, were cannon fodder to the militant groups, even if they sang the praises of Allah and the Taliban as they marched to war.
Bakht Wali, like many others, did not expect to return. After attending a rally called by Sufi Muhammad, an octogenarian militant leader whose will is paramount in the Swat Valley, Bakht Wali, the father of eight children, aged 1 to 21, wrote a will, gave it to his wife and listed debts to other villagers that should be paid if he died.
And who would have looked after his family, had he been killed? "My conviction is that God looks after everybody," he said, again without much conviction. "I suppose they would have been looked after by my relations." Notably, in the light of the abandonment of other families, he made no mention of the militant groups.
What awaited Sufi Muhammad's jihadis across the frontier would be hard to square with anybody's vision of a path to paradise. At best, as those who returned described it, there were days of camaraderie in training camps set up at remote villages inside Pakistan, places where the younger men, at least, were shown the workings of Kalashnikov rifles and mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, the Taliban's basic armory.
For the older men, and the boys, though, there was little but talking and running menial errands.
Afterward, there was the frontier crossing, sometimes on foot across mountain footpaths, sometimes in trucks that halted at Pakistani border posts long enough for the men to register their names, villages and weapons with Pakistan's frontier constabulary.
It is to those posts that families of the missing go, day after day, hoping their relatives will show up on the ever-shortening lists of those re-entering Pakistan. With the Taliban now routed from every city in Afghanistan, hope dwindles by the day.
Once in Afghanistan, many of the jihadis found themselves unwanted.
The fittest and best-trained were sent quickly to the front lines, which, until the Taliban's sudden collapse in late November, defined the war. Trenches there faced the mustering forces of the Northern Alliance, and U.S. bombs, north of Kabul, the Afghan capital, and outside Mazar-e-Sharif, Herat and Kunduz, cities north and west of the Hindu Kush mountain range that divides Afghanistan. These were the men, mostly, who never came back.
But others, like Bakht Wali, endured weeks of aimless waiting and wandering, unwanted and even resented by the Taliban, who seem to have considered the untrained Pakistanis a drain on their time and their resources, especially their limited supplies of food.
Bakht Wali's group, originally about 130 men, all from Chakdara, moved from the eastern city of Jalalabad to Kabul, the capital, where they were quartered in an abandoned building on the outskirts until 40 of the fittest men were chosen by the Taliban to go to the front lines.
For three weeks, the closest that Bakht Wali's group came to the enemy was the vapor trails in the skies above Kabul left by B-52s heading for the Taliban front lines farther north. Then suddenly they were moved to an old mud-walled fort outside the town of Tagab Bazaar, about 50 miles northeast of Kabul.
Outflanked, the Pakistanis in the fort found themselves under heavy rifle, rocket and mortar fire from alliance troops, with nobody to command them.
The Taliban, as they did at Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif, had pulled out under cover of darkness, not telling the Pakistanis. Alone, muddled and frightened, the Pakistanis talked about resisting, and then surrendered by the light of a crescent moon.
For them, the jihad was over, without a shot fired, abandoned by Afghans they had gone to help. Their pitiful old rifles, muskets and pistols were seized by alliance soldiers. Their wallets and even their sweaters and shoes were stolen.
They were many days from home, with no telephones and no food, and many of them were now barefoot. But they were alive, and they had learned some lessons about the Taliban, about abandoned loyalties, and about the uncertainties of faith.
"When the attack on the fort came," Bakht Wali said, "the Taliban were not there, we didn't know the area, we knew nothing. We were alone."
What then, he was asked, did the Pakistanis make of the Taliban's promise to fight to the death beside them? "Well, not every Taliban is a bad person - there are good men among them," he said. "But our strong complaint is they never told us we should retreat."
To Bakht Wali's group, the conclusion, as they made their way back to Pakistan, clambering aboard trucks heading for the border, was that the alliance troops, if not better than the Taliban, were at least no worse.
"They're all Afghans - the only difference is in the beards and the turbans," he said. But farther north, where the 40 younger men from the group had been sent, around Taliban entrenchments at Mazar-e-Sharif and Kunduz, things were different. So far, none of those men have made it back to Chakdara, and probably none ever will.
In the Swat Valley, it is the Islamic militant leaders who seem likely to have to answer for these men who have not come back. Sufi Mohammed, like most of the other top militant leaders, is in prison now, sentenced recently to three years on charges of inciting the Pakistani army to revolt.
In his absence, his lieutenants are still preaching hellfire against the United States up and down the valley, and still raising money, though not for the families grieving for jihadis who have not come home.
"The people who went to Afghanistan were not soldiers; just having a gun does not make you a warrior," said Syed Zaffar Saghir, a disillusioned activist for Sufi Mohammed's group who "made jihad" against Soviet forces in Afghanistan but stayed behind this time.
"So a lot of innocent people have died," he said, "and Sufi Mohammed and other religious leaders are responsible for this. They sent people who had no training whatsoever to war, and then they stayed back in Pakistan. They are still alive, while so many others have died."
Copyright (c) 2001 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Information may not be stored in electronic format.

[MohammedA]

NO CHEERFUL HOMECOMING AWAITS DEFEATED TALIBAN FIGHTERS IN PISHIN, PAKISTAN.


By Juan O. Tamayo, Knight Ridder Washington Bureau.
Dec. 11-PISHIN, Pakistan-The roughly 200 Taliban fighters who have come home to the apple-growing oasis of Pishin on Pakistan's border with Afghanistan are not getting the hero's welcome they might have expected when they set off across the border to fight the holy war.
"People blame them for the destruction of Afghanistan," said shopkeeper Mohammed Akhram.
The U.S. bombing campaign against the Taliban, who were haboring terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, detonated massive and often violent anti-American protests across the Muslim world. But as the Taliban militia collapsed with stunning swiftness it has become plain that people here have little patience with losers.
That is a remarkable reversal, especially for a hamlet that not looked on with pride long ago as some of its youths, filled with Muslim zeal, went off to join the Taliban.
Now police are keeping an eye on Taliban who returned in defeat. Villagers no longer listen to their views on religious issues. Only their madrassas, the Islamic seminaries long accused of turning out zealots, welcome them. And even they are under new pressure.
Sales of bin Laden posters trailed off, and anti-American demonstrations around Pakistan have dwindled to small crowds of diehards usually outnumbered by police.
If Pishin is anything to judge by, defeat has so discredited the Taliban among their hometown neighbors that they will find it difficult to continue promoting their politics or their puritanical brand of Islam.
Pishin is a relatively prosperous agricultural district of 300,000 people, a drab brown town and dozens of mudbrick hamlets spread around an oasis in the Baluchistan desert, 40 miles from the border with Afghanistan.
People here are all Pashtuns, the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and second largest in Pakistan. Tens of thousands are refugees from the many Afghan wars.
Over the years hundreds of youths educated in local madrassas routinely went to Afghanistan to help the Taliban, a movement born in 1994 in the neighboring province of Kandahar, battle first the mujahedeen warlords and later the northern alliance, which is dominated by Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara minorities.
About 200 have now returned home, according to Pishin journalist Saadullah Taarim, shaving the long beards and taking off the black or white turbans that marked the Taliban and for awhile became the fashion even among Pishin teen-agers too young to join the fighting.
A few remain defiant.
"We are not defeated. We were and are waiting to face the American ground troops," said Jan Mohammed, 24, a chubby Taliban machine gunner who was visiting his alma matter, the Key to Knowledge madrassa, for what he said was a home leave approved by his commanders after five months of combat duty.
Neighbors are showing little sympathy.
"The people are not happy with them. Due to these Taliban the whole of Afghanistan is facing a catastrophic situation," said taxi driver Shaista Khan. "Now they have no support among the people."
Relatives of Pishin Taliban killed or missing in Afghanistan are angry with madrassa leaders because they have not returned the bodies of their loved ones, said village elder Niamatullah Khan, 56, stroking his white 4-inch beard.
"We have three missing in 30 families here, and nowhere to put the flags," Khan said of the colorful streamers that Afghan Muslims leave on their relatives' graves as signs that they have not been forgotten.
Even Afghans in the no-name refugee camps that dot the oasis, once strongholds of the Taliban, say they no longer obey the Taliban's admonitions against playing music and flying kites as violations of Islamic customs.
"Because before they had a government in Afghanistan, they were all powerful. They even used to harass the people in the camp," said Abdul Malik Kakar, a 44-year-old bus driver.
"Now their role is passive. They have kept themselves in their homes, and they do not do business with the people of the camps," he said as he stared at a young man in his bus whom he later identified as a Taliban.
"These are the people who for the sake of one person have destroyed the whole of Afghanistan," he added, loudly enough for everyone around him to hear him.
"These people have no roots in society now," said Inayatullah Qaisarnai, deputy Pishin district director, adding that local police and tribal constabularies are watching the Taliban closely.
"We have received instruction from our superiors that if anyone creates a mishap in society or disturbs in any other way, we should deal with them with an iron hand," he said. "We will give no concession to anyone."
That goes also for the madrassas, long seen as graduating only semi-literate but zealous village mosque leaders and stalwarts for Pakistan's half-dozen radical Islamic political parties.
Mullah Humayoun's Rebirth of Knowledge Madrassa charges students, mostly poor village boys, $16 for a year's tuition, room and board, and $10 for tuition alone. It teaches only the Koran, Islamic law and philosophy - no math, no science.
Its "library" is a wooden cupboard stuffed with maybe 20 well-worn texts and lots of booklets printed by Jamiat-Ulama Islamia, the party that Humayoun supports and whose striped white and black flag flies over the madrassa.
"Osama is a hero of Islam," the bearded Humayoun, wearing a silky black turban and a crisp white knee-length shirt and baggy pants, told a Western visitor after he denied that his school imparts a radical version of Islam to its students.
Last week, the government began drafting a law that would require madrassas to obtain clearances from security authorities and open their financial books to outside inspectors.
Schools would be required to teach modern subjects such as math, history and science, and inspectors would check whether the religious classes are teaching radical or more widely accepted versions of Islam, said a senior Interior Ministry official who has seen the draft law.
"We want to make sure that they can teach Islam, but not extremism," the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said in a telephone interview from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.
Back in Pishin, residents said a test of the Taliban's and madrassas' acceptance among their neighbors will come Dec. 22, when the schools reopen after nine weeks of vacation around the Muslim holy month of Ramadan that coincided with the Taliban militia's collapse in Afghanistan.
"I will not send my son Najib back there," said farmer Rahmantullah, 49, his blue knee-length shirt filthy with the dirt of his tiny melon patch.
"Najib came home last year talking big about the Taliban and Islam. But he's only 15. What does he know? And next year he will be old enough to join the fighters," said Rahmantullah. "I will keep him here on the farm."
-
(c) 2001, Knight Ridder. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
(c) Copyright Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News, 2001.

[MohammedA]

TALIBAN SUPPORTERS RETURN HOME - PAKISTAN - VICTOR MALLET LOOKS AT THE ...


By VICTOR MALLET.
ATTACK ON AFGHANISTAN - Taliban supporters return home - PAKISTAN - Victor Mallet looks at the fate of thousands of Pashtun tribesmen who went as volunteers to fight 'the infidels'.

Urged on by the mullahs at their local mosques, thousands of Pashtun tribesmen from northern Pakistan picked up their Kalashnikovs and marched across the border into Afghanistan as soon as the US started bombing the Taliban regime in October.
They expected to help their Taliban brethren and fight infidel Americans. Instead, they found prison, betrayal or death. The Americans were mostly in the air above them, raining down bombs, and the soldiers who shot them on the ground were fellow Muslims from Afghanistan's Northern Alliance.
"We went to fight against the infidels. We were told that the Hindus were there," Izat Gul, a 26-year-old labourer who spent two weeks defending the Afghan town of Jalalabad, said yesterday. "Many people were killed, and when we realised we could do nothing, we came back."
Shafiq Shah, another volunteer from the Malakand area east of Peshawar, described how he fought alongside Taliban and Arab forces on the front line at Bagram, north of Kabul. To his amazement, three Taliban commanders switched sides, precipitating a retreat to Kabul and then towards Kandahar.
On the Kandahar road, he was stopped at roadblocks thrown up by Afghan villagers. "They were robbing people, demanding Kalashnikovs and money. Those who refused to hand them over were killed." Shafiq concluded: "What we did was right, but we had a lot of enemies - the Americans, the local people, the Northern Alliance. Even our Muslim brothers became our enemies."
To add insult to injury, the warlords who once again control Afghanistan are offering to ransom Pakistani prisoners to their families for Rs100,000-Rs200,000 ( $1,600-$3,300) each, according to several residents of Malakand.
The collapse of the puritanical Taliban regime has caused turmoil in this part of Pakistan's North West Frontier province. Pakistani Pashtuns, baffled and angry about the course of the war and the ransom demands, are threatening to attack the many Afghan refugees in the area, especially Tajiks and other non-Pashtuns identified with the victorious Northern Alliance.
"If our men are not released in Afghanistan, then we will punish Afghans living in Pakistan," said 25-year-old Khista Rahman, speaking with more passion than logic. "There are many refugees."
It was Sufi Mohammed, now jailed in Pakistan after returning from the Afghan battlefield, who persuaded many of the illiterate Pashtuns in the area to sacrifice themselves for the Taliban.
He is head of the extremist Tariq Nafaz Shariat-e-Mohammedi (Movement for the Enforcement of the Prophet's Sharia).
According to his deputy, Maulvi Mohammed Alam, the group sent 10,000 fighters in half a dozen groups to fight for the Taliban. Many have returned and dozens are in Pakistani jails after being caught at the frontier trying to return home. Some were to be sent home yesterday from Jalalabad as a gesture for the Muslim Eid al-Fitr festival.
But about 1,500 are still missing. "We think they have either been martyred or arrested," said Mr Alam, who wears a Taliban-style black turban. Pakistani fundamentalist organisations have been weakened by the Taliban's defeat. Their anti-American demonstrations, so vigorous at the start of the war, are now poorly attended.
Gen Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president, has seized the opportunity for a crackdown. Yet Pakistan's religious leaders are unrepentant. Perhaps because of the links between Pashto-speakers on either side of the border, they remain convinced that they have a right to intervene in Afghanistan in a way that other foreigners do not. It is an attitude that infuriates Afghans of all political and religious persuasions in Kabul.
"We're happy that our men have gone there and been killed or injured, and they are happy too," said Mr Alam. "They got what they demanded. They were praying to be martyred or injured in order to receive the blessing of God."
The mullahs in Malakand argue that Muslims have a religious obligation to help the Taliban because the Taliban is the only regime to have introduced proper Islamic law. Any Afghan who opposes the Taliban is an agent of the US or Russia, or simply a bad Muslim, and all the charges against Osama bin Laden, the suspected terrorist mastermind sheltered by the Taliban, are false or unproven, they say.
The problem for the Pakistanis who went to fight in Afghanistan is that large numbers of Afghans disagree. Abdul Khayoum, who has lived in Pakistan as a refugee for 15 years, expressed surprise at the naivety of the Pakistani guerrillas who crossed the border only to be bombarded by US warplanes and then robbed by Afghans. "I think they had it coming to them," he said.
Pakistani captives in Afghanistan are a sorry sight. Shah Hussein, a 20-year-old detained by the Northern Alliance in a fetid dungeon in Kabul, said in an interview last week that some Pakistani mullahs had praised the September 11 attacks, as well as encouraging young men like him to go and fight.
"Someone told us there was a battle between Muslims and non-Muslims," he said. "But we didn't see any Americans."
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