| Border Offensive Has Paktika Residents on Edge The Washington Post
03/15/2004
By Pamela Constable
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Anti-Terror Efforts Put Vise on Afghan Region ORGUN, Afghanistan - Six months ago, this remote and drought-starved region near the Pakistani border was gradually falling under the control of Islamic militias. Local officials had been assassinated, foreign aid workers had pulled out and tribes in the badlands on both sides of the border were giving haven to Taliban and al Qaeda forces. Now, as U.S. military officials launch a major anti-terrorist operation called Mountain Storm across southeastern Afghanistan, Paktika province is becoming a focus of intense attention from American and Afghan authorities as they try to purge the area of violent, extremist influence. At the same time, thousands of Pakistani troops are sweeping through the semi-autonomous tribal areas that hug their side of the 1,200-mile frontier. So far, the signs of change in Paktika are scattered or subtle. Orgun is a bustling market town, a nexus of traffic with tribal Pakistan and host to a U.S. Special Forces base. Residents say that whatever happens next may exacerbate tensions with their Pakistani neighbors, necessitate greater displays of loyalty to the government and its U.S. backers and possibly squeeze them in a military pincers. "The Pakistanis hate us now. They hate our government, and they call us killers for cooperating with the Americans," said Nawab Khan, 23, a jobless man who was a war refugee in Pakistan for 20 years but is now reluctant to travel there. "I'd like to get a job with the American forces," he said with a rueful laugh, "but if they don't hire me, maybe I'll have to join al Qaeda." In Sharan, the provincial capital, Gov. Gulab Mangal is impatient to embark on an ambitious agenda of providing long-needed social services, women's emancipation and civic awareness, with an eye to preparing Paktika for presidential elections expected to be held by August. But first, he has to worry about fallout from the new anti-terrorist campaign. "My highest priority is education, followed by health, roads, water and encouraging people to take part in free and fair elections," Mangal said in his new office. "But this is a border province, so we have to be realistic about the problems. If people try to escape from the operations on the other side, we will have to be ready." Paktika is somewhat tainted by its proximity to South Waziristan, a rebellious, semi-autonomous tribal area in Pakistan where U.S. officials believe tribesmen may be sheltering senior al Qaeda leaders, possibly including Osama bin Laden. For weeks, Pakistani troops have swept through South Waziristan, raiding village compounds in an attempt to flush out extremists and their supporters. Now, U.S. ground troops and gunships are expected to launch mirror operations on the Afghan side in what U.S. officials here have called a hammer-and-anvil maneuver. "All our problems come from Pakistan. It is a hypocritical country that tells the thief to steal and tells the homeowner to be alert," said Mohammed Ghaus, the district administrator of Orgun. "The Taliban aren't organized enough to worry us. They can only do guerrilla operations. But the mullahs are in control on the other side, and everyone knows they are training al Qaeda." In the past year, however, Islamic extremists have found haven in parts of Paktika as well, driving out both local officials and foreign aid projects. Last fall, the civilian administrator of Barmal border district was assassinated, and a U.N. report found that 12 of Paktika's 22 districts were influenced by former Taliban forces and two border areas had "fallen" to extremists. At the time, the U.N. reported that the governor, Muhammad Ali Jalali, was playing a "double game" by professing loyalty to Afghan President Hamid Karzai while maintaining links to local former Taliban leaders. Now that Karzai has replaced Jalali with Mangal, authorities said officials had been replaced throughout the provincial bureaucracy and the state's grip is stronger. Terrorist attacks have continued sporadically in recent months, though most have been aimed at U.S. military bases close to the border. On March 6, about 40 heavily armed fighters assaulted a base in Lawara, another border district. The attack was repelled, but only after a fierce battle that U.S. officials said left nine enemy fighters dead and 14 under arrest. Paktika is one of Afghanistan's most neglected and tradition-bound provinces, with no paved roads, no electricity, no safe drinking water, no girls' schools and perhaps half a dozen doctors. Drought has turned the land into a dust bowl, and the only industry is illegal logging in the half-denuded hills. Yet there is scattered evidence of ambitious public works, begun in past political eras and then abandoned. In Sharan, the provincial capital that is little more than a windswept truck stop, Kuwaiti charities built a state-of-the-art hospital in 1999, during the Taliban era. But work was slowed by U.N. sanctions and halted after the Taliban was toppled in 2001. The immaculate facility -- with modern operating rooms, well-stocked pharmacies and Arabic plaques thanking munificent sheiks -- has never been used. "This building is like a dream in the desert," said Mohammed Hassan, the government surgeon in Sharan. His patients, from a little girl with a kitchen burn to an old man with a gangrenous foot, are crammed into a dilapidated old clinic next to the locked and silent hospital. "We have no staff, and there are no roads to bring them, no arteries to bring blood to the province," he said. Paktika is also a deeply conservative, ethnic Pashtun province that shares both tribal and religious roots with the Taliban. Women almost never leave their village compounds, even fully veiled, and Hassan said some men refuse to let him deliver their wives' babies even if the mother is in danger of dying. One of Mangal's first gestures as governor was to call a meeting last month of Islamic clerics, whom he persuaded to endorse women's right to vote in the national elections, as long as separate female voting facilities were arranged. But even so, some clerics remain adamantly opposed to the idea. "No one here would ever let their wives go to the bazaar and vote, or even go shopping alone," said Mohammed Ibrahim, a teacher of the Koran at a religious school for boys in Orgun. "It is part of our Muslim zeal. If we let our women go out to shop or vote today, they would be sitting in the cinema tomorrow, and that is not in our tradition." Still, Ibrahim and his staff, who teach English and math as well as Islamic studies, insisted they did not support al Qaeda. They echoed the complaints made by many in Paktika, who feel mistrusted by both their American guests and their Pakistani neighbors. "We are like a ball being tossed from one side to the other," said the English teacher, Gazi Mahmad. While U.S. Special Forces based here focus on the hunt for Islamic fighters, and thousands of other American troops prepare to launch regional raids, most people in Paktika remain more concerned about other sources of violence, especially highway robbery and tribal disputes that are sometimes mistakenly blamed on al Qaeda. In Orgun, truck drivers described frequent, after-dark ambushes on the cratered, winding road leading north to Sharan and eventually to the highway that goes to Kabul. "The Americans are only interested in al Qaeda, but they should be concerned about our safety," said a driver in the Orgun bazaar, adding that U.S. forces need to be careful whom they believe when they are given reports on local al Qaeda sympathizers. "Sometimes people have disagreements over land, and one tells the Americans the other is with al Qaeda so they will bother him." Still, despite scattered complaints of raids on houses and mosques, support for the U.S. military presence here remains enthusiastic, in part because so many residents have benefited from it. The U.S. base in an old mud fort has been a fountain of largesse, with schoolboys attending free English classes, farm communities receiving tractors and jobless men hired to build schools or dig wells for wages of up to $7 a day. Meanwhile, though, the region's traditional ties to Pakistan have become increasingly strained. Many Orgun residents lived there for years as war refugees, many families have relatives on both sides and there remains a still constant flow of cross-border cargo, commerce and migrant labor between Orgun and South Waziristan. But there is a new barrier of mistrust and fear as well. Despite the Pakistan government's support for the U.S. anti-terror campaign, people here said Waziri tribes resent both the intrusion of Pakistani troops and the creeping conversion of Paktika from Taliban sanctuary to U.S. stronghold. Orgun residents who once traveled easily into Pakistan now say they are viewed as suspicious, pro-American infidels on the other side. "Pakistan's tongue is with the U.N., but its heart is with al Qaeda," said Zaher Dad, the recently named police chief here. Once, he said, many Paktikans joined the fight against Soviet occupation and some later sympathized with the Taliban's religious goals, but now things have changed. "Everyone here realizes this is a no longer a fight for Islam," he said. "It is just a fight over money and power."
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