THE TALIBAN, REGROUPED AND REARMED

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
here Friday 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, recoil-less
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. He also draws a clear link between
reconstruction and violence: "Wherever the roads end, that's where
the Taliban starts."

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 -- nor have any of
the top leaders of the militias headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and
Jalaluddin Haqqani, who are fighting U.S. forces alongside the Taliban.

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-Qaeda 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.

A U.S. military official in Afghanistan told me he is "extremely
worried" about the pact, through which Pakistan agrees to withdraw
army units from the region and will turn over checkpoints to local
tribes that are effectively Taliban. And with military force against
the Taliban highly unpopular among residents in the border region,
the upcoming Pakistani presidential election in 2007 means that even
less action will be taken in the months ahead.

Mullah Dadullah, a key Taliban commander, gave two interviews to
al-Jazeera in the past year in which he made several illuminating
observations about the scale and nature of the insurgency. Dadullah
put Taliban forces at about 12,000 fighters -- considerably greater
than a U.S. military source's estimate of 7,000 to 10,000, but a
number that could have some validity given the numerous part-time
Taliban farmer/fighters. Dadullah also stressed the Taliban's "close
links" to al-Qaeda. "Our cooperation is ideal," he said, adding that
Osama bin Laden is issuing orders to the Taliban. Indeed, a senior
U.S. military intelligence official told me that "trying to separate
Taliban and al-Qaeda in Pakistan serves no purpose. It's like picking
gray hairs out of your head."

Dadullah also noted that "we have 'give and take' with the mujaheddin
in Iraq." Considering the rising number of suicide attacks in
Afghanistan and the increased use of makeshift bombs, Taliban forces
appear to have learned from the Iraqi insurgents. A videotape posted
on the Internet by al-Qaeda in May shows how critical Iraqi
techniques have become to the Afghan insurgency: The tape shows an
Arab suicide bomber in Afghanistan prepping a car bomb, and driving
it into an American convoy.

Just as suicide bombings in Iraq had an enormous strategic impact --
from pushing the United Nations out of the country to helping spark a
civil war -- such attacks may also plunge Afghanistan into chaos.
Already, suicide attacks have made much of southern Afghanistan a
no-go area for foreigners and for any reconstruction efforts.
According to Hekmat Karzai, head of an independent terrorism research
center in Kabul, these attacks "have really instilled fear in the
heart of the population." Luckily, for the moment, the suicide
attackers in Afghanistan have not been nearly as deadly as those in
Iraq. As one U.S. military official explained to me, almost all of
the Taliban's suicide bombers are "Pashtun country guys from
Pakistan," with little effective training.

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, 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.