US Frustrated by Taliban Resilience

The Taliban are demonstrating a resilience and ferocity that are sowing alarm here, in Washington and in other NATO capitals, and engendering a fresh round of soul-searching over how a relatively ragtag insurgency has managed to keep the world's most powerful armies at bay.

Six years after being driven from power, the Taliban have once again penetrated Afghanistan to the point that security officials talk of a noose tightening around the capital, Kabul, leaving the Afghan people more despairing than at any time since 2001.

The mounting toll inflicted by the insurgents, including nine American soldiers killed in a single attack last month, has turned Afghanistan into a battlefield more deadly than Iraq and refocused the attention of America's military commanders and its presidential contenders on the Afghan war.

After visiting Afghanistan two weeks ago, Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, described the situation here as "precarious and urgent." His Republican opponent, Senator John McCain, has said, "Security in Afghanistan has deteriorated, and our enemies are on the offensive."

Both candidates have pledged to send more U.S. troops if elected.

But the objectives of the war have become increasingly uncertain in a conflict in which Taliban leaders say they do not feel the need to control territory, at least for now, or to outfight American and NATO forces to defeat them. They need only to outlast them in a region that is, in any case, their home.

The Taliban's tenacity, military officials and analysts say, reflects their success in maintaining a cohesive leadership even after being expelled from Afghanistan, their ability to attract a continuous stream of recruits and their advantage in having a haven across the border in Pakistan.

While the Taliban enjoy such a sanctuary, they will be very hard to beat, military officials say, and U.S. officials have stepped up pressure on Pakistan in recent weeks to take more action against the Taliban and other militants.

That included a visit in July by a top official of the Central Intelligence Agency who, U.S. officials say, confronted senior Pakistani leaders about the relationship between the country's powerful spy service and militants operating in Pakistan's tribal areas.

Pakistani officials say those ties, which stretch back decades, have been broken. But there is no doubt that the Taliban continue to use Pakistan to train, recruit new members, regroup and resupply their insurgency.

The advantage of that haven in Pakistan, even beyond the lawless tribal realms, has allowed the Taliban leadership to exercise uninterrupted control of their insurgency. The leaders have done this through the same clique of mullahs and military commanders who ran Afghanistan as a theocracy and harbored Osama bin Laden until they were driven from power in December 2001 in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

The Taliban's leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, is widely believed by Afghan and Western and some Pakistani officials to be based in Quetta, capital of Baluchistan Province in Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan.

He runs a shadow government, complete with military, religious and cultural councils, and has officials and commanders appointed to virtually every Afghan province and district, just as he had when he ruled Afghanistan, according to the Taliban's own publicity wing. He oversees his movement through a grand council of 10 people, according to a Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahed.

Mullah Bradar, one of the Taliban's most senior field commanders, serves as his first deputy. He passes down Omar's commands and makes all military decisions, including how foreign fighters are deployed, said Waheed Muzhta, a former Taliban Foreign Ministry official who lives in Kabul and follows the progress of the organization through his own research.

But while the Taliban may be united politically, the insurgency remains poorly coordinated at operational and strategic levels, said General David McKiernan, commander of the NATO force in Afghanistan.

Taliban forces cannot hold territory, and they cannot defeat NATO forces in a direct fight, other NATO officials say. They also note that scores of senior and midlevel Taliban commanders have been killed over the past year, weakening the insurgents, especially in the south.

Three senior members of the grand council were killed in 2007, and others have been detained, Muzhta said.

But despite those losses, the Taliban repeatedly express confidence that the United States and its allies will tire of a thankless war in a foreign land, withdraw and leave Afghanistan open for a return of the Taliban to power.

The Taliban say they need little in the way of arms or materiel.

"The Taliban are now mounting a hit-and-run war against their enemies," said Mujahed, the spokesman. "It doesn't need much money or weapons compared to what the foreign troops are spending."

Even so, Western officials say the Taliban have a steady stream of financing from Afghanistan's opium trade, as well as from traders, mosques, jihad organizations and sympathizers in the region and Arab countries.

At the same time, the Taliban leadership can still exploit their position as moral authorities - Taliban means religious students - which gives them overarching power over the various commanders, bandits, smugglers and insurgents fighting around Afghanistan.

That aura is increasingly terrifying. Known for their harsh rule when in power, the Taliban have turned even more ruthless out of power, and for the first time they have shown cruelty even toward their fellow Pashtun tribesmen.

"The goal of terrorism is to terrify and to intimidate," said a Western official in Kabul. "It is not to take and hold territory. It is not to dominate institutions. It is not to win the allegiance of the populace. It is to terrify. And the tactics of the Taliban are more terroristic even than at the end of the last fighting season."

The Taliban have used those terrorist tactics - including beheadings, summary executions of people accused as spies, abductions and death threats - as well as a skillful propaganda campaign to make the insurgency seem more powerful and omnipresent than it really is, and the perception matters here.

"The increasing use of very public attacks has had a striking effect on morale far beyond the immediate victims," the International Crisis Group, a nongovernmental organization that seeks to prevent and resolve deadly conflicts, says in a recent report.

Some of that brutality may be attributed to the growing influence of Al Qaeda, but much of it has by now taken root within the insurgents' ranks.

After the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban sought refuge in Pakistan's border areas, which have since become a breeding ground where the Taliban, Al Qaeda and foreign fighters have found common cause against the U.S. forces in Afghanistan and have shared terrorist tactics and insurgent strategies.

Pakistan's tribal areas along the border are now the main source for recruitment of fighters for Afghanistan, McKiernan said. Pakistani insurgent groups in the region - Pakistani Taliban - have also become a potent threat to the security and stability of Pakistan itself.

Jihad does not recognize borders, the Taliban say, and indeed much unites the Taliban on both sides of the border. They share a common Pashtun heritage, a longstanding disregard for the Afghan- Pakistani border drawn by the British, and the goal of establishing a theocracy that would impose Islamic law .

In fact, the dispatches of the Pakistani Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, carry the symbol of the Islamic Emirate, the name the Afghan Taliban have always used for their government.

Mehsud and his cohort have sworn allegiance to the Afghan Taliban leader, Omar, as well as to Jalaluddin Haqqani, a former minister in the Taliban government who now commands Taliban forces in much of eastern Afghanistan.

Western military officials often describe Haqqani as running a distinct network with close links to Arab members of Al Qaeda, but he has also proclaimed allegiance to Omar. Even bin Laden has paid tribute to Omar as amir ul-momineen, or leader of the faithful, the paramount religious leader.

To avoid jeopardizing their sanctuary or their hosts, however, the Taliban have always maintained the pretense that their leadership is based inside Afghanistan and that the insurgency is made up entirely of Afghans.

The two Afghan Taliban spokesmen, Mujahed and Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, who speak regularly by telephone to local journalists, never reveal their whereabouts. They profess sympathy for their Muslim brothers, the Pakistani Taliban, but deny that there is any joint leadership or unified strategy.

They also say that the Afghan Taliban broke with Al Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks, which led to the U.S. invasion and the fall of the Taliban government in Afghanistan.

The Afghan government dismisses those assertions, however, and it insists that the Taliban on both sides of the border are directed by Pakistani intelligence officials with the aim of destabilizing Afghanistan and maintaining some sway over their neighbor.

"Without Pakistan, the Taliban would not exist," one Afghan official in southern Afghanistan said, stating a commonly held view in Afghanistan.

While the Pakistani government was one of the only supporters of the Taliban government when it was in power from 1996 to 2001, today the Pakistani authorities profess not to know the whereabouts of Omar or his colleagues. On rare occasions when the Pakistani authorities have cooperated with NATO and detained senior Taliban figures, they have not announced it publicly.

But Afghan and NATO officials say the Taliban today operate much as the mujahedeen did in the 1980s, when they used Pakistan as a base to drive off the Soviet Army, which had invaded Afghanistan.

Many members of President Hamid Karzai's government, who were themselves mujahedeen, say the Taliban are even using some of the same contacts from 20 years ago, including a well-known trader in Quetta who handles logistics, housing and other goods. He was widely known to be the front man for the largest Pakistani intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, according to one former mujahedeen commander who is now a senior official in the Afghan government.

Meanwhile, Taliban spokesmen dismiss the idea of negotiations or power-sharing deals with the Afghan government, even though the government says that more Taliban members have made overtures to talk in recent months.

"We carried out the fight to oppose the invaders," said one of the Taliban spokesmen, Qari Yousuf. "Now they are on the brink of humiliation. That's the aim of our fight."