Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
Walking the narrow goat trails of Kunar Province, Taliban and al-Qaida fighters can travel with their weapons to and from Pakistan. But which way are they headed?
Sep 19, 2002 | The intelligence officer's face is in shadow, as it should be. Sher Hassan is sitting with his back to the single window in his mud-brick office, where he serves as deputy chief of intelligence for Kunar Province, on Afghanistan's mountainous border with Pakistan. There's nothing on his desk. The only furniture in the room consists of a battered couch and two bare coffee tables. We sit in the dark waiting for him to speak to us.
"If you want to talk about the problems of Afghanistan, you should really talk to the governor," he says. I explain that the governor will just tell me what he tells everyone else, and that I'd like to hear it from him instead. Sher Hassan weighs this, and then in a tone meant to educate, says, "We are here to find the enemies of Afghanistan wherever they are. Those people coming to make trouble for the new government, trying to cause problems for us, our job is to capture them." Sher Hassan's enemies were not far away, if recent news reports were accurate.
Sher Hassan claimed that there were Taliban forces in Pakistan, funded and armed by Pakistani intelligence, who were trying to infiltrate back into Afghanistan across the mountainous border. Lending a measure of credibility to his fear is the constant U.S. military presence in Kunar, and on Sept. 6, journalists staying in Asadabad heard an airstrike that took place in one of the valleys near Pakistan. There were two enormous explosions, followed by a convoy of helicopters headed for the Nawa Pass, about 10 miles south of the provincial capital.
"I challenge anyone who says there are no terrorists in Pakistan. They are all there. I can show you," Sher Hassan's silhouette said to us. Pakistani government officials have denied similar charges and accuse the Afghans of being unable to control their own territory, a suggestion that makes many people here furious. In any case, the U.S. military activity so close to the border with Pakistan proves that Sher Hassan is not the only official nervous about infiltration.
The intelligence officer talked just long enough to reveal who he thought was behind all the ammunition and weapons buying in the tribal areas, and he was losing sleep over it. Hassan's bogeyman was a legendary and brutal commander in the war against the Soviets, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was born a few short miles from Asadabad. Hekmatyar had thrown his lot in with the Taliban, and in a recent BBC radio address from a secret location, urged all Afghans to rise up and throw out the infidels. Hekmatyar was calling for a second great jihad, a war against the Americans.
The U.S. took careful note of his rhetoric, and has made him a target of their search and seize operations. After the collapse of the Taliban regime, Hekmatyar fled to Iran, but after intense diplomatic pressure from the U.S. the Iranian government asked him to leave. Now, in what can only be worrisome to U.S. military observers, Hekmatyar and his political party, Hezb-I-Islami, have a broad base of support in Kunar Province, and perhaps more worrisome still is that they do not know where he is. Widespread disillusionment with the U.S. presence, frustration at the depredation of local warlords and the return of Hekmatyar to his former home in Kunar seems a formula for an instant anti-American jihad. Rumors were circulating in town that he was hiding in the mountains of Nurestan, assembling an army.
"Yes, Hekmatyar and the Taliban are in an alliance, but he is not in Kunar Province," said Sher Hassan. "He's in Dir." The town of Dir is in Bajawar agency, Pakistan, just across the border from Asadabad, a mere 50 miles away.
Toward the end of the interview, Sher Hassan made a striking observation that departed from the usual diet of rumor and half-truth common in Afghanistan. Asked how he knew the Taliban was regrouping in the mountains, he said simply, "The price of bullets is very high in Nawagai now." Nawagai is a small town in the tribal areas of Pakistan, just on the other side of the Nawa Pass. Sher Hassan meant that people were buying up all the available ammunition, driving up the price.
We came to Asadabad in Kunar Province to see if we could find an answer to an important question: How precisely are people slipping into Afghanistan from Pakistan? And are weapons and ammunition slipping in, or out, the same way? If Taliban members and others are coming to make trouble for the new government, they would have to rely on a network of secret smuggling routes that wind across the rocky spine dividing the two countries.
The routes are not on any map; they are not near roads; and it would take days of making discreet inquiries in Kunar Province until we could find someone willing to show us where they were. Rumors breed near the border, and the only way to understand the situation was to try to travel the routes ourselves. So after our meeting with Sher Hassan, I set off with my translator, Aman Khan, to make the journey.
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