Government, coalition gaffes in Afghanistan help Taliban

QALAT, Afghanistan — Until the Taliban were driven from power, Mullah Ehsanullah was an intelligence official, enforcing the militia's Islamic orthodoxy in eastern Afghanistan.

Five years later, he is again busy in the Taliban ranks, shepherding recruits through the guerrilla training camps hidden in the rugged terrain here and in Pakistan's tribal regions across the border.

He says a new generation is learning tactics such as suicide bombings and use of remote-detonated explosives that have had a devastating effect in Afghanistan. These recruits have contributed to the average of 600 attacks launched each month this year against government officials, NATO and U.S. soldiers, the Afghan National Army and police.

The religious militia is capitalizing on the anger and frustration of Afghan civilians against their foreign-backed government, seen as deeply corrupt and slow to bring improvements or even basic security to the more remote regions of the country, Ehsanullah and others say.

"The people in the beginning were saying that, 'OK, the war is finished, we want stability. It is time for peace. It is over,' " Ehsanullah said.

But government help hasn't reached many Afghans, and much of the country has returned to the 1990s anarchy and lawlessness that gave rise to the Taliban's iron-fisted rule.

Taliban fighters defend villagers against criminal gangs which often are linked to the government, he said. They don't perform the arbitrary arrests and searches that are conducted by the Western troops who occasionally patrol the region. Also boosting their ranks are Western airstrikes that often kill civilians along with combatants.

"If this is all they are going to do for us, is kill us, they should get out," shouted Ghulab Shah, a middle-age man from Ashogho in southern Kandahar after nine of his neighbors were killed as they slept when a NATO bomb blasted their home.

Kandahar Governor Asadullah Khalid shares the frustration. "How are we supposed to bring security to the country with this kind of thing happening?" he asked.

The government, he said, can replace the houses destroyed in the raids. "But who do you build a house for if they are all dead?"

The Taliban defeat in 2001 provoked a backlash against their harsh rule and a surge in support for the new government. From Zabul province in southeast Afghanistan, 2,000 young men went to Kabul to sign up for the new national army or police forces.

All returned, police officials say, frustrated by poor salary or perceived ethnic bias in the new government. All but four joined the Taliban, they said.

And to the common people, criminal gangs abetted by the police and military are as big a threat in many areas as the fundamentalist militia, said Noor Mohammed Paktin, Zabul's police chief.

"Many times when they say Taliban attacked cars on the highway, it is thieves, sometimes ... with the help of the police," Paktin said in his office in Zabul's provincial capital, Qalat.

Paktin said he has tried to weed out corruption but complained that his officers earn only $60 a month, and haven't received even that in the past three months. He said his letters to the Ministry of the Interior asking what happened to the money have gone unanswered.

Corruption is so widespread, he said, that some people have quit dealing with officialdom and turned to Taliban councils to resolve disputes.

On top of bribery and extortion among security forces, some top government officials tolerate Afghanistan's thriving drug trade, the police chief said. "I am trying my best to control drug traffickers," he said. "But inside the government, I am getting trouble. The drug mafia has its links inside the government."

President Hamid Karzai said corruption's part in fueling the insurgency has been overstated, and that Afghanistan is less corrupt than some of its neighbors.

Instead, he insisted the main problem is that Pakistan's failure to control its tribal areas is fostering the Taliban resurgence.

Regardless of who is to blame, Afghans have lost faith in the central government, and its authority in the outlying regions barely exists.

Today, local officials say, most of Zabul province is under Taliban control. In Kandahar and Helmand provinces in southern Afghanistan, government influence is restricted to the capital cities and a few district headquarters, according to Najibullah, a career police officer who asked that his full name not be used, for fear of being disciplined.

Police morale is low, he said, and officers have not been paid in months. About 70 of his 350 men have quit. "Why am I fighting?" Najibullah said. "Because I am a career military man and I should defend the government. But I know that from the ministers right down to the soldiers they are all thieves."

Some Afghans who welcomed the U.S.-led troops five years ago now resent them. Even after years of operating in Afghanistan, Najibullah said, NATO and U.S. forces still get caught in the middle of tribal feuds and ancient grudges, raiding homes or attacking villages on dubious tips.