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The Karzai government has attempted to rein in recalcitrant warlords. Most recently Karzai appointed Kandahar strongman Gul Agha Sherzai, a U.S.-installed warlord who has been dogged by accusations of corruption and nepotism, to a Cabinet position in Kabul as a way of keeping him under close watch. But Afghan officials say Karzai is wary of cracking down too hard for fear that the warlords will lash back. In Kabul alone, militias loyal to former President Burhanuddin Rabbani and current Defense Minister Mohammed Qasim Fahim number nearly 50,000. That's enough to overwhelm, if they wanted to, the 6,000 NATO peacekeepers and take over the presidential palace. Government officials outside the capital are even more outmanned. "The warlords still have guns, they still have men, and until that changes there's nothing we can do," says a senior police officer in Kandahar. "The areas they capture are theirs to exploit."
The warlords' land grabs have been sustained by the return of Afghanistan's most lucrative cash crop: opium. Outlawed by the Taliban in 2000, opium-poppy cultivation has spread from eight provinces in 1994 to 28 today. U.N. experts expect this year's crop to yield 3,600 tons of opium — 75% of the world's heroin. According to the U.N., the combined income of poppy farmers and opium smugglers last year was $2.32 billion — equal to half of Afghanistan's official GDP. A Western anti-narcotics expert in Kabul estimates that 60% of the country's regional warlords are profiting from the drug traffic, using the cash to fund their armies and, in doing so, weakening the reach of Karzai's government in the provinces. A Cabinet minister who tried to stop traffickers two years ago was assassinated in Kabul, reportedly by a drug cartel. "Our national interests are at stake," says Mirwais Yasini, head of the Counter-Narcotics Directorate in Kabul. "We're facing anarchy."
The Taliban's Revival
The country's disorder, U.S. and Afghan officials say, has been a boon for the Taliban. The regime's leadership survived U.S. bombs in 2001, retreating to border towns in Pakistan. From there, the mullahs reconstituted their military chain of command and tasked followers to form bombmaking and sabotage cells, according to a NATO source. A senior American official says the U.S. has encountered the most resistance from resurgent Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in the Zabul province near Kandahar. Their fighters move in groups of 15 to 20 and avoid attention. Their aim: to kill anyone cooperating with U.S. forces. "They are smart," says the official.
And now they are raising the stakes. Two months ago, the Taliban claimed responsibility for two suicide bombings that killed a Canadian and a British soldier. Last week, just the day before Karzai declared the Taliban "defeated," five members of an Afghan nonprofit group were shot dead by suspected militants. In Spin Boldak, a dusty smugglers' crossroads in southeastern Afghanistan, the Taliban have launched four major ambushes from Pakistani hideouts against Afghan government outposts over the past nine months, killing dozens. Abdul Raziq, the pro-U.S. garrison commander in Spin Boldak, says he has received intelligence from tribal allies in border towns like Chaman that the Taliban are gearing up for a major guerrilla campaign. "They are coming," he says. "It's only a matter of time."