In These Remote Hills, a Resurgent al-Qaeda

GHULAM HASNAIN FOR TIME
REBEL DANCE: Waziris celebrate after their leaders decide to defy a ban on public displays of arms

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According to the former Taliban official, al-Qaeda agents are teaching the Taliban how to build bombs, to use remote controls to set off land mines under U.S. military vehicles, and to attach fuses to timers so that rockets fire long after the saboteurs have crept away. The same source says al-Qaeda operatives abroad plan to bring into Afghanistan, via Iran, some 800 satellite telephones so fighters can coordinate future ambushes. He claims that the militants have worked out an ever changing code so that U.S. eavesdroppers will think they are overhearing ordinary, mundane phone calls.

The U.S. is already having difficulty collecting intelligence in Waziristan. Last year the CIA dispatched several operatives to set up a base in an unused school in Miramshah, in north Waziristan. They were protected by Pakistani troops. The U.S. officers are still dug in, despite protest demonstrations and repeated rocket attacks by locals. Attempts to recruit local informants, meanwhile, are complicated by the fact that suspected collaborators are often murdered.

According to both the Taliban source and a retired Pakistani intelligence officer, the U.S. has lately been trying a different approach to pacifying the militants. These sources say CIA operatives in Kandahar delivered a letter requesting talks to former Taliban Interior Minister Mullah Abdul Razzaq, thought to be hiding in Afghanistan. A Taliban military council, according to this account, responded with three conditions: that the U.S. release Taliban prisoners in Guantanamo, that it stop referring to Taliban members as terrorists and that it announce that talks with the Taliban came at Washington's request. The ex-Taliban source says the CIA refused. "But they agreed to telephone links," he added. U.S. officials in Kabul, for their part, denied having any contact with the Taliban.