AMERICA'S JUGGLING ACT

Unless U.S. Takes Action, The Afghanistan Ball Will Hit The Ground,
Allowing The Taliban To Accumulate Power

KABUL, Afghanistan - The interpreter's hand-held radio crackled with
the sound of intercepted Taliban transmissions, and he signaled the
infantry patrol to wait while he translated. At 7 a.m. one morning
late in the summer, peasants were already out scything wheat, with
their children tending fields of pink and white poppies that would
soon add to Afghanistan's record-setting opium and heroin supplies.
We were 9,000 feet up, in the hamlet of Larzab, in a remote part of
Zabul province -- the heart of Talibanland.

Our interpreter, Mohammed, estimated that the Taliban fighters were
less than half a mile away. We walked through the fields for 20 more
minutes before stopping next to a small hill. The chatter revealed
that the Taliban were "watching us and waiting for us to get closer,"
Maj. Ralph Paredes explained to me as his men radioed to their base
the likely coordinates of the hidden fighters. Soldiers back at the
base -- a mud-walled compound without electricity or water -- fired
mortar rounds over our heads to a hill several hundred meters from
our position, where the Taliban might be hiding. We never learned
whether they found their target.

Just one more patrol, and one more skirmish, in Afghanistan's war --
a conflict in which the fighting and ferocity are regaining strength
with each passing month. Indeed, the U.S. military and NATO are now
battling the Taliban on a scale not witnessed since 2001, when the
war here began, and are increasingly fighting them in remote areas
such as Larzab where the Taliban once roamed freely.

When I traveled in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003, the Taliban threat
had receded into little more than a nuisance. But now the movement
has regrouped and rearmed. Bolstered by a compliant Pakistani
government, hefty cash inflow from the drug trade and a population
disillusioned by battered infrastructure and lackluster
reconstruction efforts, the Taliban is back -- as is Afghanistan's
once forgotten war.

In the past three months alone, coalition forces have killed more
than 1,000 Taliban fighters, according to Col. Tom Collins, a U.S.
military spokesman, while the religious militia has killed dozens of
coalition troops and hundreds of Afghan civilians, spreading a
climate of fear throughout the country. And suicide attacks in
Afghanistan have risen from single digits two years ago to more than
40 already this year. Most of the victims are civilians -- including
more than a dozen bystanders who were killed in Kabul Sept. 8 when a
bomb-laden car struck a convoy of armored U.S. vehicles just 200
yards from the U.S. Embassy; the attack also killed two U.S. soldiers
and wounded a third. Half an hour after the blast, I watched as
firefighters hosed down the streets, which were littered with shards
of blackened metal and singed body parts.

I recently traveled to Afghanistan for three weeks, meeting with
government officials, embedding with U.S. soldiers from the 2-4
Infantry and interviewing senior American military officers. I found
that while the Taliban may not constitute a major strategic threat to
President Hamid Karzai's government, they have become a serious
tactical challenge for U.S. and NATO troops, as the war here
intensifies. And their threat is only amplified by their ubiquity and
invisibility.

"In this place, they are everywhere," explained Mohammed, our
interpreter. "They are sitting here as a farmer. Then they are Taliban."

When I visited Zabul province in July, Lt. Col. Frank Sturek was in
charge of U.S. military operations there. Sturek, from Aberdeen, Md.,
earned his insurgent-fighting stripes in Mosul, Iraq, under the
tutelage of Lt. Gen. David Petraeus. When I spoke to Sturek, he had
recently lost two of his men in firefights with the Taliban. In a
nighttime interview conducted by flashlight in the mud compound,
Sturek described a two-hour struggle on July 19 against about 120
Taliban who were armed with mortars, recoilless rifles, machine guns
and rocket-propelled grenades. Judging from newly dug graves, Sturek
estimated 35 to 40 Taliban had been killed.

Despite their numerous casualties, the Taliban are much more willing
than Iraqi insurgents to engage in pitched battles, Sturek said.
"These guys will mix it up," he said, "and they use a lot more direct
fire." In the five months he had been in Afghanistan, he noted, none
of the Taliban fighters his men had fought had ever surrendered.

Echoing all other U.S. officers I interviewed in Afghanistan, Sturek
emphasized that the Taliban threat required a political solution, not
a military one, and that expanding the U.S. presence and
reconstruction efforts into remote areas would win the long-term
conflict. "You can win every firefight you want, but the battle is in
these villages," he said. "This is where you change the minds of the
people -- or at least create a doubt that the Taliban are not
preaching the right message."

A political solution is also the mantra of the U.S. commanding
officer in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, an intense,
intellectual soldier who speaks Mandarin and is on his second tour in
the country. Over coffee in his Kabul office, he said that the
situation in Afghanistan still looks reasonably optimistic. "I tell
everyone: 'Don't look at the snapshot'," he said. "Look at the movie
called Afghanistan."

For Eikenberry, that movie features the democratically elected
president and parliament, as well as millions of boys and girls who
are newly in school. Indeed, in the most recent poll of Afghan public
opinion, released by ABC News in December 2005, 77 percent of Afghans
said their country is headed in the right direction.

Of course, a similar poll today might find fewer Afghans with this
point of view, given rising dissatisfaction with the Karzai
government and growing anti-American sentiment revealed in riots that
shook Kabul in May. Eikenberry acknowledges that "the strength and
coherence of the Taliban movement is greater than it was a year ago,"
citing tribal and land disputes and trafficking in narcotics as
reasons for the resurgence.

An amnesty program formally begun in 2005 by the Karzai government
offers one promising approach to containing the Taliban threat. In
Qalat, the provincial capital of Zabul, I witnessed U.S. forces
release Mullah Abdul Ali Akundzada, who was accused of sheltering
Taliban members and had been arrested near the site where a makeshift
bomb had detonated. In a deal brokered by the Karzai government and
the U.S. military, Akundzada was handed over to a group of about 30
religious and tribal leaders, who publicly pledged that the released
mullah would support the government. In an honor-based society such
as Afghanistan, this program is working well. According to Afghan and
U.S. officials, only a handful of the more than 1,000 Taliban
fighters taking advantage of the amnesty have gone back to fighting
the government and coalition forces.

Yet even as the amnesty program shows promise, Afghanistan's
ballooning drug trade has succeeded in expanding the Taliban ranks.
It is no coincidence that opium and heroin production, which now
makes up about half of the Afghan economy, spiked at the same time
that the Taliban staged a comeback. A U.S. military official told me
that charities and individual donations from the Middle East are also
boosting the Taliban's coffers. These twin revenue streams -- drug
money and contributions -- allow the Taliban to pay their fighters as
much as $100 a month, which compares favorably to the $70 salary of
an Afghan police officer. Whatever the source, the Taliban can draw
upon significant resources, at least by Afghan standards. One U.S.
military raid on a Taliban safe house this year recovered $900,000 in cash.

The Taliban's growing presence in central Afghanistan's Ghazni
province -- outside the group's traditional strongholds in the south
and east -- is another benchmark of its strength. Nearly half the
districts in Ghazni are now under significant Taliban influence, a
U.S. military official said. The Taliban units operating there aim to
control access to Kabul 100 miles to the north, just one more sign
that Taliban forces increasingly move across the country with ease.

But the key to the resurgent Taliban can be summarized in one word:
Pakistan. The Pakistani government has proved unwilling or incapable
(or both) of clamping down on the religious militia, even though the
headquarters of the Taliban and its key allies are in Pakistan.
According to a U.S. military official, not one senior Taliban leader
has been arrested or killed in Pakistan since 2001.

Amir Haqqani, the leader of the Taliban in Zabul province, "never
comes across the border" from Pakistan into Afghanistan, Sturek told
me. The Taliban's most important leadership council, the Quetta
Shura, is based in the capital of Pakistan's Baluchistan province;
the Peshawar Shura is headquartered in Pakistan's North-West Frontier
Province. In addition, Hekmatyar operates in the tribal areas of Dir
and Bajur; Haqqani is based in Waziristan; and Al-Qaida has a
presence in Waziristan and Chitral -- all Pakistani regions that
border Afghanistan.

Finally, the peace deal announced this month between the Pakistani
government and pro-Taliban militants along the Afghan border raises
more concerns that such groups will operate more freely on and across
the border.

The Afghan population remains generally pro-American, and its
appetite for more conflict is low after more than two decades of war.
However, the risks of a slide into Iraq-style chaos remain. Averting
it would require Washington to end the Afghan drug trade and compel
Pakistan to crack down on the Taliban warriors' havens. These are
both tall orders, but Washington could gain real leverage in the area
of reconstruction. So far, it has appropriated only $9 billion for
Afghan reconstruction, as compared with $34 billion for Iraq, even
though Afghanistan is larger and more populous and has greater
infrastructure needs. And of the appropriated amount, only $2.5
billion, a State Department official told me, has been spent.

In the absence of greater U.S. investments in roads, power and water
resources, the Taliban will surely prosper and continue to gain
adherents. Unless they take decisive action now, U.S. policymakers
may be looking back in a few years, asking themselves why they lost
Afghanistan despite the promise the country showed after the fall of
the Taliban regime.

PETER BERGEN is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and
author of "The Osama bin Laden I Know" (Free Press).

He wrote this article for the Washington Post.