He's Welcome In Pakistan

What followed was a disaster: For 27 months after the fall of the Taliban regime, Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Washington's closest ally in the region, allowed the extremists free rein in the Pashtun tribal areas to re-establish training camps for militants who had escaped Afghanistan. These included Arabs, Central Asians, Chechens, Kashmiris, Africans, Uighurs and a smattering of East Asians. It was a mini-replay of the gathering in Afghanistan after bin Laden arrived there in 1996.

Musharraf did capture some Arab members of al Qaeda, but he avoided the Taliban because he was convinced that the U.S.-led coalition forces would not stay long in Afghanistan. He wanted to maintain the Taliban as a strategic option in case Afghanistan dissolved into civil war and chaos again. The army also protected extremist Kashmiri groups who had trained in Afghanistan before 9/11 and now had to be repositioned.

Indeed, in March 2002, just three months after the defeat of the Taliban, the United States began to withdraw its Special Forces, surveillance satellites and drones from Afghanistan to prepare for war in Iraq. Distracted by Baghdad, it did not notice what was happening in the tribal agencies. By the time the Pakistan army entered South Waziristan in March 2004, the extremists were so well entrenched that 250 Pakistani soldiers were killed in the first encounters.

Since then, with no consistent political strategy to woo the Pashtun population away from bin Laden, the army has steadily lost ground. The political agents, who ran the tribal agencies with a mixture of bribery and pressure, have been replaced by arrogant generals ignorant of local conditions. Today the extremists rule over North and South Waziristan and other tribal agencies, while the 70,000 Pakistani troops stationed there are boxed up in outposts, too frightened to patrol the mountains. More than 100 pro-government tribal elders have been assassinated by extremists for divulging information to the U.S. or Pakistani secret services.

Meanwhile down south, the Balochistan provincial government is controlled by a coalition of pro-Taliban fundamentalist parties, which came to power in elections in 2002. Jamiat-e-Ulema-i-Islami, the party that controls the key ministries, openly supports the Taliban.

This has created a new stronghold from which the Taliban can launch attacks back in Afghanistan. The 99 U.S. soldiers killed last year in Afghanistan were mostly targeted by the Taliban based in Balochistan. While Washington's principal aim has been to capture bin Laden and decapitate al Qaeda, whose members are believed to be in Waziristan, the United States has failed to pressure Pakistan to deal with the Taliban, despite protestations from Afghan President Hamid Karzai. On a visit to Islamabad this month, Karzai handed Musharraf intelligence dossiers detailing how suicide bombers are being trained in Pakistan. In the past few months, at least 30 attacks have killed nearly 100 people in Afghanistan, including NATO peacekeepers and a Canadian diplomat.

The dossiers listed the names and addresses of Pakistani recruiters and people who equip suicide bombers with explosives before sending them to Afghanistan. Much of the recruitment takes place at a radical Islamic bookshop, several mosques and some madrassas in the port city of Karachi, while the training is done at safe houses in Quetta and Chaman, in Balochistan province.

"We have provided President Musharraf with a lot of very detailed information on acts of terrorism . . . and we discussed in great detail what actions Pakistan could now take," Karzai told me on Feb. 17 in Islamabad. ''Americans are dying, a Canadian diplomat has been killed, our people are suffering. So it is time that action is taken to stop these acts of terrorism and interference in Afghanistan internal affairs," he said. "We expect results."

Getting those results won't be easy. Bin Laden has fighters and sympathizers down the length and breadth of Pakistan's Pashtun belt. No Pakistani Pashtun has reason to betray bin Laden, despite the $27 million reward for his head. Thanks to the drug trade in Afghanistan and the suitcases full of cash still arriving from backers in the Arabian Gulf, neither al Qaeda nor the local Pashtuns are short money. The Pakistani army's failure to offer Pashtuns a greater political role in the national framework has not inspired any loyalty among the tribesmen. And misguided U.S. interventions, such as the January missile strike that killed women and children, do the rest.

Washington's recent decison to start pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan this year has only reinforced al Qaeda's belief that it is winning. After nearly five years of avoiding capture or death, every single day that bin Laden stays alive is a day that inspires the extremists who protect him and join his ranks.

Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist, is the author of "Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia" (Yale University Press) and "Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia" (Penguin Books).