IN THE LAND OF THE TALIBAN

Deciding to Fight

Inside the old city walls of Peshawar, Pakistan, a half-hour drive
from the Afghan border, in a bazaar named after the storytellers who
enthralled Central Asian gold and silk merchants with their tales of
war and tragic love, sits the 17th-century Mohabat Khan Mosque. It is
a place of cool, marble calm amid the dense market streets.

Yousaf Qureshi is the prayer leader there and director of the Jamia
Ashrafia, a Deobandi madrasa.

He had recently announced a pledge by the jewelers' association to pay
$1 million to anyone who would kill a Danish cartoonist who
caricatured the Prophet Muhammad. Qureshi himself offered $25,000 and
a car. I found Qureshi seated on a cushion behind a low glass desk
covered with papers and business cards -- ambassadors, N.G.O. workers,
Islamic scholars, mujahedeen commanders: he has conversed with them
all. His office resembles an antiques shop, the walls displaying
oversize prayer beads, knives inlaid with ivory and astrakhan caps. It
was day's end, and Qureshi was checking the proofs for his 51st book,
called "The Benefits of Koran."

Qureshi told me that he meets with Pakistan's president, Pervez
Musharraf, about twice a year. Qureshi understands Musharraf's
predicament: "The heart of this government is with the Taliban. The
tongue is not." He didn't claim total insider knowledge, but he said,
"I think they want a weak government and want to support the Taliban
without letting them win." Why? "We are asking Musharraf, 'What are
you doing,' and he says: 'I'm moving in both ways. I want to support
the Taliban, but I can't afford to displease America. I am caught
between the devil and the deep sea."'

Not long ago, Qureshi said, he received three emissaries from Mullah
Omar who wanted Qureshi to warn another religious leader to stop
preaching against the Taliban. "I refused," he said. Later Sheikh
Yassin, one of the messengers, was arrested by the I.S.I., Pakistan's
military intelligence service.

So why, I asked, does Qureshi say the I.S.I. is supporting the
Taliban? "That is the double policy of the government," he replied.

Even in the 1990's, he said, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was
supporting the official Afghan government of Burhanuddin Rabbani while
the I.S.I. was supporting his opponent, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, as he
rained thousands of rockets upon Rabbani's government and the citizens
of Kabul. Qureshi told me that if he and local traders didn't want Al
Qaeda or the Taliban to flourish, then they wouldn't. "We are
supporting them to give the Americans a tough time," he said. "Leave
Afghanistan, and the Taliban and foreign fighters will not give Karzai
problems.

All the administrators of madrasas know what our students are doing,
but we won't tell them not to fight in Afghanistan."

The new Taliban fighters in Afghanistan are of three basic types.
There are the old war-addicted jihadis who were left out of the 2001
Bonn conference, which determined the postwar shape of Afghan politics
and the carve-up of the country.

There are the "second generation" Afghan refugees: poor, educated in
Pakistan's madrasas and easily recruited by their elders.

And then there are the young men who had jobs and prestige in the
former Taliban regime and were unable to find a place for themselves
in the new Afghanistan.

Coincidentally, there are also now three fronts.

One is led by Mullah Omar's council in Quetta. The second is led by
Jalaluddin Haqqani, a hero of the jihad against the Soviets who joined
the Taliban. Although well into his 80's, he orchestrates insurgent
attacks through his sons in Paktia, Khost and Paktika, the Afghan
provinces close to Waziristan, where he is based.

Finally, there is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the former leader of
Hezb-i-Islami, the anti-Soviet fighters entrusted with the most money
and arms by the U.S. and Pakistan. He had opposed the Taliban, living
in uneasy exile in Iran until the U.S. persuaded Tehran to boot him
out; he sneaked into the mountainous eastern borderlands. Since the
early days of Karzai's government, he has promised to organize Mullah
Omar's followers with his educated cadres and finance their jihad
against Karzai and the American invaders.

Old competitors are coming together in much the way the mujahedeen
factions cooperated to fight the Russians. Hekmatyar adds a lethal
ingredient to this stew: his ties and his followers extend all through
Afghanistan, including the north and the west, where he is exploiting
factional grievances that have nothing to do with the Pashtun
discontent in the south.

An Afghan I met outside Peshawar -- for his safety he asked me not to
use his full name -- was typical of the 20-something Talibs who had
flourished under the Taliban regime.

He was from Day Chopan, a mountainous region in Zabul Province,
northeast of Kandahar. When the Northern Alliance and the Americans
took Afghanistan, he escaped through the hills on an old smuggling
route to the North-West Frontier Province.

It was familiar terrain.

A.'s father had been a religious teacher who studied in Sami ul-Haq's
famous Haqqaniya madrasa near the Khyber Pass and preached jihad for
Harakat, one of the southern mujahedeen parties whose members filled
Mullah Omar's ranks.

Those old ties still bind and have provided a network for recruiting.
A. grew up in madrasas in the tribal Pashtun lands of Waziristan,
where he learned to fire guns as a child in the American-financed
mujahedeen camps.

As a teenage religious student in Wana, the capital of South
Waziristan, he would go door to door collecting bread for his fellow
Talibs. Behind one of those doors, he saw a girl and fell in love.
When his father wouldn't let him marry the girl, he threatened to go
fight in Afghanistan. His father would not relent, and A. signed up at
the local Taliban office in Peshawar. "We got good food, free service,
everything was Islamic," he told me. "It was the best life, rather
than staying in that poor madrasa." His father soon did relent, and A.
became engaged, but he was only 15 and had no money.

So he went back to the Taliban and was soon working beside the deputy
defense minister. "Of course, then there were bags of money," he said.

A., now 28, was living in an Afghan refugee village that used to
belong to Hekmatyar's group.

Weak with malaria, he was nevertheless plump and jovial, even funny at
times.

Only when the Pakistani intelligence services came up did his already
sallow hues pale to old bone.

After fleeing the American bombardment in 2001, he told me, the
Taliban arrived in Pakistan tattered, dispersed and demoralized. But
in the months after the collapse, senior Taliban leaders told their
comrades to stay at home, keep in touch and wait for the call. Some
Taliban told me that they actually waited to see if there was a chance
to work with Karzai's government.

"Our emir," as A. referred to Mullah Omar, slowly contacted the
commanders and told them to find out who was dead and who was alive.
Those commanders appointed group commanders to collect the underlings
like A. Weapons stashed away in Afghanistan's mountains were
excavated. Funds were raised through the wide and varied Islamic
network -- Karachi businessmen, Peshawar goldsmiths, Saudi oil men,
Kuwaiti traders and jihadi sympathizers within the Pakistani military
and intelligence ranks.

Mullah Omar named a 10-man leadership council, A. explained.

Smaller councils were created for every province and
district.

Most of this was done from the safety of Pakistan, and in 2003 Mullah
Omar dispatched Mullah Dadullah to the madrasas of Baluchistan and
Karachi to gather the dispersed Talibs and find fresh recruits.

Pakistani authorities were reportedly seen with him. Still, neither
Musharraf nor his military men in Baluchistan did anything to arrest
him.

It was a perfect job for Dadullah, whose reputation for bravery was
matched by his savagery and his many war wounds, collected in more
than 25 years of fighting.

In 1998, his fighters slaughtered hundreds of Hazaras (Shiites of
Mongol descent) in Bamiyan Province, an act so brutal it was even too
much for Mullah Omar, who had him disarmed at the time. Dadullah's
very savagery, filmed and now often circulated on videotape, coupled
with his promotional flair, were just the ingredients Omar needed to
put the Taliban back on the map.

Today, Quetta has assumed the character of Peshawar in the 1980's, a
suspicious place of spies and counterspies and double agents.

It is not just the hundreds of men in typical Afghan Pashtun clothing
- -- the roughly wound turbans, dark shalwar kameez, eyes inked with
kohl -- who squat on Thursday afternoons outside the Kandahari mosque
in the center of town, comparing notes on the latest fighting in
Helmand or the best religious teachers.

Rather, as I wandered the narrow alleyways of the Afghan
neighborhoods, my local guides would say, "That's where Mullah
Dadullah was living" or "That's where Mullah Amir Khan Haqqani is
living." (Haqqani is the Taliban's governor in exile for Zabul
Province.) Mullah Dadullah is now a folk hero for young Talibs like A.
And all the Taliban I met told me that every time Dadullah gives
another interview or appears on the battlefield, it serves as an
instant injection of inspiration.

By 2004, A. said, he was meeting a lot of Arabs -- Saudis, Iraqis,
Palestinians -- who taught the Afghans about I.E.D.'s (improvised
explosive devices) and suicide bombings. "They taught us how to put
explosives in plastic," he told me. "They taught us wiring and
triggers. The Arabs are the best instructors in that." But now the
Afghans are doing fine on their own. Pakistani jihadis in Afghanistan
received their training, they told me, from Pakistani officers in Kashmir.

The southerners have also forged ties with the Pakistani Taliban in
Waziristan. There is a free flow of arms and men between Waziristan
and the Afghan provinces across the border.

According to A., even Uzbeks from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan
have joined some of the fighters now in A.'s home mountains in Day
Chopan.

It was disheartening to hear A. describe his first encounter with
Americans, who were trying to set up a base in a remote region of
Zabul. Though they were building a road where no roads had gone
before, he could perceive that asphalt only as a means for the
Americans to transport their armored vehicles and occupy Muslim lands.
A friend of his joined us as we were talking.

He had just arrived in Pakistan from the Day Chopan region and said
that the Americans were like a cyclone of evil, stealing their almonds
and violating their Pashtunwali (the Pashtun tribal laws). In this
instance, he meant the law by which even a cousin will not enter your
house without knocking first.

A. is now a media man in Pakistan, coordinating the editing of films
for discs, censoring them in case there are commanders who don't want
their faces seen and distributing them. He proudly offered me the
latest disc of Mullah Dadullah beheading some "spies for the
Americans." He said he had sold 25,000 CD's about the fighting in Waziristan.

He was full of contradictions. He said that if he didn't have a house
in Day Chopan, he would never spend a single night there because there
was no education, no electricity, no power, nothing, just a heap of
stones.

Yet he did not want America to change all that. "We don't like
progress by Americans," he declared. "We don't like roads by
Americans. We would rather walk on tired feet as long as we are
walking in an Islamic state."

Was it all just bravado speaking?

Was an opportunity to build bridges to young men like A. somehow lost
or just neglected?

It was hard to tell. But when the I.S.I. subject came up again, his
tone changed. "They are snakes," he told me. He said that they were
trying to create a new, obedient leader and oust the
independent-minded Mullah Omar, and for that, the real Taliban hated
them. Then he said: "I told you that we burn schools because they're
teaching Christianity, but actually most of the Taliban don't like
this burning of schools or destroying roads and bridges, because the
Taliban, too, could use them. Those acts were being done under I.S.I.
orders.

They don't want progress in Afghanistan." An Indian engineer was
beheaded in Zabul in April, he said, and that was also ordered by
Pakistan, which, from fear of the influence of its enemy, India, was
encouraging attacks on Indian companies. "People are not telling the
story, because no one can trust anyone, and if I.S.I. knows I told
you," he said, he would be dead.

Pakistan's Assets

There are many theories for why Pakistan might have wanted to help the
Taliban reconstitute themselves. Afghan-Pakistani relations have
always been fraught.

One among the many disputes has to do with the Durand Line, the
boundary drawn up by the British in 1893 partly to divide the Pashtun
tribes, who were constantly revolting against the British. The Afghan
government has never recognized this line, which winds its way from
the Hindu Kush mountains of North-West Frontier Province 1,500 miles
down to the deserts of Baluchistan, as its border. Nor have the
Pashtun tribes.

The Pakistanis may hope to force Karzai to recognize the Durand line
in exchange for stability.

Another theory is that Musharraf must appease the religious parties
whom he needs to extend his power past the end of his term next year.
Musharraf bought them off, gave them control of the North-West
Frontier Province and Baluchistan and let them use the Taliban. And
finally, the Pakistanis see Afghanistan as their rightful client. They
want an accommodating regime, not Karzai, whose main backers are the
U.S. and India, Pakistan's nemesis.

Pakistan's well-established secular Pashtun nationalist political
leaders remain distraught that their lands have again become
sanctuaries for the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani religious
parties, which, since elections in 2002, rule these provinces and are
completing a Talibanization of the region.

The secular leaders point to another layer in Pakistan's games:
keeping the tribal areas autonomous enables Pakistan's intelligence
services to ward off the gaze of Westerners and keep their jihadis
safely tucked away.

One thing you notice if you visit the homes of retired generals in
Pakistan is that they live in a lavish fashion typical of South
America's dictatorship-era military elite.

They control most of the country's economy and real estate, and like
President Musharraf, himself a former general, they do not want to
relinquish power.

Although there is a secularist strain in the Pakistani military, it
has been aligned with religious hard-liners since the army's inception
in 1947. Many officers still see their duty as defending the Muslim
world, but their raison d'etre has been undermined by the fact that
though Pakistan was founded as a refuge for South Asia's Muslims, more
Muslims today live in India. They seem to envy the jihadis' clarity.

The militants had no identity crises.

According to Najim Sethi, a prominent Pakistani journalist, military
officers often have "a degree of self-disgust for selling themselves"
to the Americans, and they still bear a grudge against the United
States for abandoning them after the Afghan jihad and, more recently,
for sanctioning Pakistan over its nuclear program.

The standard army phrase about the Americans was, he said, "They
usedus like a condom."

Officers spoke to me as if they were simply translating the feelings
of the jihadis for a tone-deaf audience, but they sounded more like
ventriloquists. One retired colonel I spoke to was a relative of a
Taliban leader from Waziristan, Abdullah Massoud, who had earned both
sympathy and reverence for his time in Guantanamo Bay. Massoud was
captured fighting the Americans and the Northern Alliance and spent
two years there, claiming to be a simple Afghan Talib. Upon his
release, he made it home to Waziristan and resumed his war against the
U.S. With his long hair, his prosthetic limb and impassioned speeches,
he quickly became a charismatic inspiration to Waziristan's youth.

Since 2001, some of Waziristan's tribes have refused to hand over
Qaeda members living among them. Under intense American pressure,
Pakistan agreed for the first time in its history to invade the tribal
areas.

Hundreds of civilians and soldiers were killed. American helicopters
were seen in the region, as were American spies. The militants (with
some army accomplices) retaliated with two assassination attempts
against Musharraf late in 2003. He struck back, but as the civilian
casualties mounted and the military began to balk at killing
Pakistanis, Musharraf agreed to a deal in the spring of 2004 whereby
the militants would give up their guests in return for cash. Pakistani
officers and the militants hugged and shed tears during a public
reconciliation. But the militants did not relinquish their Al Qaeda
guests, and they took advantage of the amnesty to execute tribal
elders they said had helped the Pakistani military. The tribal
structure in Waziristan was devastated, and the Taliban took to the
streets to declare the Islamic emirate of Waziristan. Since Musharraf
signed a truce with the militants last month, attacks launched from
Waziristan into Afghanistan, according to NATO, have risen by 300 percent.

"Muslim governments are not able to face the Americans," the retired
colonel from Waziristan said, explaining the mujahedeen mind-set. "If
Muslim governments should stand up against duplicity and foreign
hegemonic designs, and they don't, who will? Someone has to stand up
to defend the Muslim countries, and it's this that gives the jihadis
the courage and zeal to stand up to the worst atrocities. This is the
core issue of the mujahedeen movement.

You call it the war on terror. The mujahedeen call it jihad." And so,
essentially, did he.

One afternoon, in the midst of a monsoon, I sought out one of the
founders of the pro-jihadi strategy, the retired general Mirza Aslam
Beg. He lived in Rawalpindi, the military capital half an hour from
Islamabad, in a brick and tile-roofed mansion with a basketball hoop,
flowing greenery and Judy, his one-eyed cocker spaniel.

The house was immaculate, with marble floors, rugs, fine china and
porcelain on display behind glass and an amusing portrait of Aslam Beg
as a young, Ray-Banned, pommaded officer.

His mansion sits across the street from Musharraf's.

Aslam Beg played a leading role in the military's creation of
"asymmetrical assets," jargon for the jihadis who have long been used
by the military as proxies in Kashmir and Afghanistan. He was chief of
the army staff from 1988 to 1991, while the Pakistani nuclear
scientist A.Q. Khan was selling the country's nuclear technology to
Iran, Libya and North Korea. Beg held talks with the Iranians about
exchanging Iranian oil for Pakistani nuclear skill.

Aslam Beg likes to remind visitors that he was one of a group of army
officers trained by the C.I.A. in the 1950's as a "stay-behind
organization" that would melt into the population if ever the Soviet
Union overran Pakistan. Those brigadiers and lieutenant colonels then
trained and directed the Afghan jihadis.

In the 1980's, "the C.I.A. set up the largest support and
administrative bases in Mohmand agency, Waziristan and Baluchistan,"
Aslam Beg told me. "These were the logistics bases for eight long
years, and you can imagine the relations that developed.

And then Chechens, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Saudis developed family relations
with the local people." The Taliban, he said, fell back after 2001 to
these baselines. "In 2003, when the U.S. attacked Iraq, a whole new
dimension was added to the conflict.

The foreign mujahedeen who'd fought in Afghanistan started moving back
to Afghanistan and Iraq." And the old Afghan jihadi leaders stopped by
the mansion of their mentor, Aslam Beg, to tell him they were planning
to wage war against the American occupiers.

As the rain outside turned to hail, banging against the windows, Aslam
Beg ate some English sandwiches that had been wheeled in by a servant.
"As a believer," he went on, "I'll tell you how I understand it. In
the Holy Book there's an injunction that the believer must reach out
to defend the tyrannized. The words of God are, 'What restrains you
from fighting for those helpless men, women and children who due to
their weakness are being brutalized and are calling you to free them
from atrocities being perpetuated on them.' This is a direct message,
and it may not impact the hearts and minds of all believers.

Maybe one in 10,000 will leave their home and go to the conflicts
where Muslims are engaged in liberation movements, such as Chechnya,
Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kashmir. Now it's a global deterrent
force."

The Authentic Jihad

The old city of Lahore, with its broad boulevards and banyan-tree
canopies, remains the cultural and intellectual heart of Pakistan. It
is home to a small elite of journalists, editors, authors, painters,
artists and businessmen. Najam Sethi, editor in chief of The Friday
Times, and his wife, Jugnu Mohsin, the publisher, are popular fixtures
among this crowd.

Like so many of Pakistan's intellectuals, they have had their share of
run-ins with government security agents. For pushing the bounds of
press freedom, Sethi was dragged from his bedroom during Nawaz
Sharif's reign, beaten, gagged and detained without charge.

Musharraf, in his new autobiography, claims that Nawaz Sharif wanted
him to court-martial Sethi for treason, an act that seemed ludicrous
to him, and he refused.

I met him one afternoon at the newspaper's offices as he was preparing
his weekly editorial.

He is a tall, affable man with smiling eyes and large
glasses.

And he got right down to business, providing an analysis of why
Pakistan had decided to bring its "assets" -- by which he meant the
Taliban and Kashmiri jihadis -- off the shelf.

In the days following 9/11, when Musharraf gathered together major
editors to tell them that he had no choice but to withdraw his support
for the Taliban, Sethi raised the touchy issue of the other jihadis.
He said that if Musharraf was abandoning the Taliban, he would have to
abandon the sectarian jihadis (fighting the Shiites), the Kashmir
jihadis, all of the jihadis, because they were all trained in mind by
the same religious leaders and in body by the same Pakistani forces.

In January 2002, Musharraf gave an unusually long televised speech to
the nation.

He reminded the people that his campaign against extremism was
initiated years before and not under American pressure. He vowed that
Pakistan would no longer export jihadis to Kashmir, that he was again
placing a ban on several jihadi organizations, that camps would be
closed and that while the madrasas were mostly educating the poor,
some were centers of extremist teaching and would be reformed.

A month later, Musharraf was at the White House next to President
Bush, who praised him for standing against terrorism.

Sethi characterized Pakistani authorities as believing that the U.S.
in Iraq "will be a Vietnam." He said: "Afghanistan will be neither
here nor there.

So we cannot wrap up our assets.

We must protect them." The I.S.I. realized it could help deliver Al
Qaeda to the U.S. while keeping the Taliban and the jihadis on the
back burner.

At the same time, Musharraf's moderate advisers were telling him that
holding on to those assets would eventually boomerang.

And soon enough, the assets began to come after Musharraf -- while the
people of Pakistan were turning against him for being pro-American.
"So going after jihadis who were protecting the Taliban came to a
halt," Sethi said.

Meanwhile the landscape next door in Afghanistan was
changing.

The warlords were back in action.

The drug economy was surging.

By 2003 and 2004, Musharraf's men were becoming hysterical about what
they saw as a growing Indian presence in Afghanistan, particularly the
Indian consulates in Kandahar and Jalalabad, the Pashtun strongholds
that Pakistan considered its own turf. Karzai was doing business with
Indians and Americans and was no longer a Pashtun whom Pakistanis
would want to do business with.

As Sethi spoke, I recalled a meeting I had with one of Kandahar's
prominent tribal leaders.

He recounted a visit from a former Pakistani general who had been
active in the I.S.I. The general invited Kandahar's leaders to lunch
and warned them not to let the Indians put a consulate in Kandahar and
to remember who their real benefactors were. Today there is a
consulate there, and Indian films and music are sweeping through the
Pashtun lands.

What is more, many Pakistanis believe India is backing the Baluch
insurgency in Pakistan's far south, clouding the prospects for the
new, Chinese-built port in Gwadar. The port is Pakistan's single
largest investment in its economic future and has been attacked by
Baluch rebels.

In many ways, Pakistani policy is already looking beyond both Karzai
and the Americans; they believe it is prudent to imagine a future with
neither.

That future will be shaped by the past: the past with India, the past
with the Soviet Union, the past with America. For Pakistan's
hard-liners, at least, the obvious choice was to take their assets off
the shelf and restart the jihad.

A Difficult Choice

On the wall outside the Eid Ga madrasa, in Kuchlak, a parched town
near Quetta, Afghan students and teachers were debating the merits of
jihad. One boy had just fled an American assault on Day Chopan in
Zabul Province. He had never been to Pakistan before.

He was frenzied, in shock.

As a student from Kandahar led the others in dusk prayer, a young boy
whispered to me, "I like America." They were hardly a unified group.

One young Helmandi told me, "We want our traditions of Islam and
Sharia, not your democracy," while another argued for peace.

Then the Helmandi asked, with genuine confusion: "Why are Muslims
being tortured everywhere in the world, and no one is there to stand
up for them? But if you touch one Westerner, the sky is on your head?"

Most madrasas in Pakistan are run by the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, the
religious-party alliance that has joined with Musharraf to keep the
popular parties of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif from regaining
power. The J.U.I. madrasas usually endorse jihad, although even here I
met madrasa students who were against the war. They subscribed to a
vision of jihad as a struggle for self-improvement and the improvement
of society.

Mawlawi Mohammadin, a cleric from Helmand, went so far as to tell me
that these are the true roots of jihad, though he confessed that his
is a lonely voice.

He was afraid of everyone -- Taliban, Pakistani intelligence, even his
pupils. "If we start openly supporting Karzai, we could be killed by
our own students," he told me with nervous laughter.

Only a month earlier, a Taliban official from Helmand who had
reconciled with Karzai's government was gunned down by assassins on a
motorbike in Quetta.

Mohammadin said that it is now open season for jihad in Afghanistan
under J.U.I. guidance.

Government ministers were even attending funerals to praise Pakistani
Pashtuns who had died fighting in Kandahar. He estimates that there
are some 10,000 Taliban fighters in Baluchistan. Despite the
intimidation, he says he feels that his mission is to steer his
students away from war.

One of these was Mohamed Nader, who had just attended a cousin's
funeral and was wondering what it all meant.

His cousin's family was poor, and without their knowledge, he had gone
to earn money first by harvesting poppies in Helmand and then by
fighting for the Taliban. Finally he was killed.

Among the biggest problems, Nader told me, was that the cohesion of
the Afghan family has been shredded by decades of poverty and refugee
life in Pakistan. In a typically strong Afghan family, young adults
obey their parents, even asking for permission to go fight.

But here, boys just run off.

Rahmatullah was one of those who had run off and returned.

He was skinny and disheveled, having just faced heavy fighting in
Kandahar. Though an Afghan, he had grown up in Baluchistan, near the
border, in an area where he said 200 fighters were now living.

The mullah at his madrasa told all the students that it was time for
jihad.

And the I.S.I. was paying cash. But his father was old and against the
war; he pleaded with him to abandon fighting.

So he sent Rahmatullah to his friend Mohammadin, hoping he might open
another path for his son. Rahmatullah told me that he wasn't sure yet
which mullah he would listen to.