Taliban Comeback Traced to Corruption

A Pakistani police officer escorts suspected Afghan Taliban militants to court in Quetta, Pakistan Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2006. Police on Tuesday arrested 39 Afghans suspected of being Taliban fighters in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta, an official said. (AP Photo/Arshad Butt) (Arshad Butt - AP)

QALAT, Afghanistan -- Until the Taliban were driven from power, Mullah Ehsanullah was an intelligence official, enforcing the militia's Islamic orthodoxy in eastern Afghanistan.

Five years later, he is again busy in the Taliban ranks, shepherding recruits through the guerrilla training camps hidden in the rugged terrain here and in Pakistan's tribal regions across the border.

He says a new generation is learning tactics such as suicide bombings and remote-detonated explosives that have had devastating effect in Afghanistan.

These recruits have contributed to the average of 600 attacks launched each month this year against government officials, NATO and U.S. soldiers, the Afghan National Army and police.

The religious militia is capitalizing on the anger and frustration of Afghan civilians against their foreign-backed government, seen as deeply corrupt and slow to bring improvements or even basic security to the more remote regions of the country, Ehsanullah and others say in interviews.

"The people in the beginning were saying that, 'OK the war is finished, we want stability. It is time for peace. It is over,'" Ehsanullah said.

But government help hasn't reached many Afghans, and much of the country has returned to the same 1990s anarchy and lawlessness that gave rise to the Taliban's iron-fisted rule.

Taliban fighters defend villagers against criminal gangs which often are linked to the government, he said. They don't perform the arbitrary arrests and searches that are conducted by the Western troops who occasionally patrol the region. Also boosting their ranks are Western air strikes that often kill civilians along with combatants.

"If this is all they are going to do for us, is kill us, they should get out," shouted Ghulab Shah, a middle-aged man from Ashogho in southern Kandahar after nine of his neighbors were killed as they slept when a NATO bomb blasted their home.

Kandahar governor Asadullah Khalid shares the frustration. "How are we supposed to bring security to the country with this kind of thing happening?" he asked.

The government, he said, can replace the houses destroyed in the raids. "But who do you build a house for if they are all dead?"

The Taliban defeat in 2001 provoked a backlash against their harsh rule and a surge in support for the new government. From Zabul province in southeast Afghanistan, 2,000 young men went to Kabul to sign up for the new national army or police forces.