Afghan men carry a wreath of flowers towards a photo of the late leader of the Northern Alliance Ahmad Shah Massoud. Afghanistan has commemorated the 2001 assassination of anti-Taliban Massoud as NATO military chiefs urged member states to send more men and equipment to combat insurgents.(AFP/Farzana Wahidy)

In this bulletin:

• Nearly 100 Taliban, governor killed on eve of 9/11 anniversary
• Afghanistan remembers anti-Taliban hero amid surge in violence
• Ex-Taliban chief details Massood slaying
• U.S. military: Suicide cell in Kabul
• 25-million-dollar Coca-Cola plant opened in Afghanistan
• The Taliban, Regrouped And Rearmed
• Bin Laden Trail 'Stone Cold'
• Officer resigns over 'grotesquely clumsy' war in Afghanistan
• UK charity warns of Afghan famine
• Top Canada reporter hit for backing Afghan mission
• The Afghan mess
• IRAN'S DRUG PROBLEM GOES BEYOND AFGHAN DELUGE

Nearly 100 Taliban, governor killed on eve of 9/11 anniversary

Kandahar (AFP) - NATO and Afghan troops killed 94 Taliban rebels in a major insurgent stronghold in southern Afghanistan while a respected provincial governor died in a suicide blast Sunday.

The violence underscored the precarious situation in Afghanistan on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks -- the atrocity that prompted the toppling of the fundamentalist Taliban.

The insurgents died during Operation Medusa, which was launched on September 2 and is the biggest anti-Taliban offensive involving NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

The fierce battles take to over 450 the number of rebels killed in the operation focussed on the Panjwayi district, which is 35 kilometres (20 miles) west of the Taliban birthplace of Kandahar.

"In the past nine days the ISAF and Afghan operation has struck hard at the insurgents' heartland," ISAF spokesman Major Luke Knittig told a news conference in Kabul Sunday.

The 94 Taliban were killed and one was wounded in four different engagements in the area from late Saturday until around dawn on Sunday, he said.

The force also inflicted "severe losses" in separate artillery and air strikes on rebels who were spotted gathering for a counterattack, the force said in a statement. The number of casualties was still being determined.

Two coalition soldiers who were training Afghan troops were also killed in combat in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, ISAF said. One died in Panjwayi during Operation Medusa and the other died in Zabul province.

Panjwayi district is one of the most entrenched Taliban hotspots in Afghanistan and has seen several deadly attacks on foreign troops and civilians.

Medusa is the biggest operation in the south since ISAF took over the area on July 31 from a US-led coalition that had driven the Taliban from power in late 2001.

There was no indication when the operation would end, NATO spokesman Mark Laity told the news conference. "When we are happy we have achieved our objectives, we will stop," he said.

One of the key tasks is to stop more Taliban from neighbouring Helmand province infiltrating the area where some 700 rebels were initially believed to be hiding out, said another ISAF spokesman, Major Quentin Innis.

Meanwhile Hakim Taniwal, the governor of Paktia province in eastern Afghanistan, his nephew and chief bodyguard were killed Sunday in a suicide attack claimed by the Taliban.

Taniwal, in his 60s, was a former sociology professor who previously lived in exile in Melbourne, Australia. He had also served as minister in the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

The bomber had been waiting outside the gates of Taniwal's office and blew himself up as the group left the building, interior ministry spokesman Yousuf Stanizai said.

Taliban spokesman Mohammad Hanif said one of the movement's fighters had carried out the attack, which follows several assassination attempts on other provincial governors.

Separately, the US military warned that a Taliban-linked suicide cell was operating in Kabul and was likely behind a suicide attack in the capital on Friday that killed 16 people including two US soldiers.

"Through our intelligence sources we know that there is a cell in Kabul, at least one, whose primary mission is to seek out coalition and international troops and hit them with suicide bombs," spokesman Colonel Thomas Collins said.

Police in Kabul discovered and defused three remote-controlled bombs hidden at a traffic roundabout Sunday. Also two policemen were killed when dozens of Taliban rebels attacked their post in western Farah province with machine guns and rockets on Saturday.

The Taliban insurgency has gathered steam this year despite half a decade of international efforts to rebuild the shattered country, which Osama bin Laden used as a base from which to coordinate the 9/11 attacks.

There are about 10,000 mainly British, Canadian and Dutch troops in the south facing what British commanders have said is the most intense fighting their forces have experienced in decades and which is worse on a daily basis than that in Iraq.

NATO military chiefs are calling on their member states to send more men and equipment to Afghanistan, saying that they are currently at about 85 percent of requirements.

Afghanistan remembers anti-Taliban hero amid surge in violence

by Bronwen Roberts - Saturday, September 9, 2006

KABUL (AFP) - Afghanistan commemorated the 2001 assassination of anti-Taliban hero Ahmed Shah Massoud as NATO military chiefs urged member states to send more men and equipment to combat insurgents.

President Hamid Karzai and other top government officials, including some of Massoud's closest associates, were among hundreds of people gathered in the city's stadium for a day of speeches and songs to glorify the national hero.

Massoud was slain on September 9, 2001 -- just two days before the September 11 attacks in the United States -- when suicide bombers believed to be from Al-Qaeda detonated a television camera while pretending to interview him.

The commemoration came one day after a massive suicide attack in the Afghan capital killed 16 people, including two US soldiers.

Referring to Friday's suicide blast at a roundabout called "Massoud Circle" -- named after the commander -- Karzai acknowledged that Afghanistan was still plagued by violence five years after the resistance fighter's killing.

But he warned "the enemy should know that every Afghan son is ready to die for the independence and freedom of this country."

"For the future of Afghanistan, we need to follow the path of Massoud and other martyrs of Afghanistan, to reconstruct our country, to save and keep it with our own power," he said on Saturday.

Security for the event was tight after a series of incidents in the past week -- besides Friday's deadly explosion, a suicide blast on Monday killed a British soldier and four Afghans.

Several rockets have been fired into the city but caused no damage. City police spokesman Mohammad Tahir Ayoobi told AFP seven bombs had been found and defused.

"We have extra security preparations in general recently ... we have patrols, we have reinforced the Kabul entrance gates. We try to prevent them getting into the city," Ayoobi said.

"Once destructive elements enter, it is difficult to stop (them) in this heavily populated city."

In an interview with Time magazine after Friday's blast, Karzai said eliminating enemies of Afghanistan would need patience, perseverance and hard work. In the volatile south, NATO-led forces said Saturday they had killed 60 insurgents in the past 24 hours, and lost one soldier.

A week ago, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) launched Operation Medusa to drive militants out of a stronghold in Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban movement that took power in 1996. Thus far, some 360 rebels have been killed.

An insurgency launched by the Taliban months after they were toppled from power in 2001 by a US-led coalition is going through its bloodiest phase yet.

Nearly 2,000 people have been killed this year -- most of them rebels, but also scores of civilians and Afghan security force members, and more than 90 foreign soldiers.

ISAF commanders have admitted the level of Taliban resistance is far greater than expected. One senior British general has said the fighting is worse on a daily basis than in Iraq.

At an annual meeting of NATO defence chiefs in the Polish capital Warsaw on Saturday, NATO military chief General Ray Henault urged member states to fulfil pledges of manpower and equipment made to the alliance.

"I reiterated to nations to send all the people and the capability they agreed were necessary and that had been signed up to," Henault said

"We are currently at about 85 percent of the requirements and want the remainder," he told a press conference. ISAF has already deployed some 10,000 mainly British, Canadian and Dutch troops in southern Afghanistan.

Ex-Taliban chief details Massood slaying - By MATTHEW PENNINGTON
Associated Press, Sun Sep 10

KABUL, Afghanistan - The beat-up video camera was delivered to Afghanistan in a box, and picked up by two clean-shaven Arabs posing as journalists. They met with Osama bin Laden before leaving on their mission — to kill mujahedeen hero Ahmad Shah Massood.

Five years after the Taliban opponent was slain by a bomb hidden in the camera, a former Taliban official on Saturday described how al-Qaida staged the killing — two days before the Sept. 11 attack on America — hoping to strike a fatal blow to the pro-U.S. Northern Alliance.

Waheed Mozhdah, director of the then-Taliban Foreign Ministry's Middle East and Africa department, also showed The Associated Press a copy of what he said was a signed letter dated Sept. 13, 2001, from bin Laden to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, urging him to launch an offensive against the alliance.

In the letter, written in Arabic, bin Laden said that if America failed to respond to the Sept. 11 attacks, it would decline as a superpower. But if the U.S. started fighting, he added, its economy would suffer a major blow and it would face the same destiny as the Soviet Union — whose ill-fated 1980s occupation of Afghanistan heralded its disintegration.

Few details have emerged previously about how al-Qaida plotted to murder Massood, the "Lion of Panjshir" who fought Soviet troops and led resistance to the Taliban regime. At the time, his Northern Alliance was under siege, barely clinging to a mountainous northern corner of the country.

But the U.S. military campaign after Sept. 11 to punish the Taliban for giving refuge to bin Laden propelled Massood's supporters to power, and the bearded commander has achieved iconic status. Giant portraits of him adorn government offices and public spaces in Kabul, and the Sept. 9 anniversary of his death is marked in grand style.

President Hamid Karzai on Saturday addressed a crowd of thousands at a Kabul stadium attending an official Massood commemoration.

"They came from outside to kill him. They put a bomb inside a camera pretending they wanted to interview him. Why did they kill him? Because he said they would defeat them," he said.

The attackers apparently were North African Arabs traveling on forged Belgian passports who managed to pass through the front line between the warring Taliban and Northern Alliance carrying their bomb.

"We never suspected journalists. Our leaders were careless," said Massood Khalili, a former Massood adviser who was seriously wounded in the blast. One of the Arabs died in the bombing. The other, who survived the blast, was shot dead by enraged bodyguards.

Mozhdah said bin Laden appeared to hint at the plot during a meeting with Taliban Information Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi in the southern city of Kandahar — the seat of the ousted Taliban regime — just after the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan in 2000.

Citing an account provided by a translator at the meeting, Mozhdah said bin Laden complained to Muttaqi about Taliban restrictions that prevented al-Qaida from contacting the media. "My hands are tied behind my back and my mouth is taped shut," an annoyed bin Laden reportedly said.

When Muttaqi blamed international pressure — including sanctions — facing the Taliban regime for hosting al-Qaida bases and fighting the Northern Alliance, bin Laden thought for a while before replying, Mozhdah said. "I know your difficulties. I'm looking at how to solve your problem," the al-Qaida leader said, without elaborating, according to Mozhdah.

Mozhdah said that the following spring — he was unsure of the precise date — a parcel from Pakistan was received at an official media office used by al-Qaida and the Taliban in Kandahar.

The box looked new, but it contained a rather old-looking video camera, Mozhdah said, and the computer technician at the office expressed puzzlement about it. A day later, he said, it was picked up by an al-Qaida official accompanied by two Arabs with shaven faces — a curious sight in Taliban-dominated Afghanistan, where men were made to wear beards.

The Arabs, known to Mozhdah only as Karim and Arbet, subsequently had the camera while purportedly taping an interview with Taliban Foreign Minister Abdul Wakil Mutawakil but never gave a requested copy to him, he said.

Mozhdah said the Arabs later met with bin Laden, top deputy Ayman al-Zawahri and Mullah Omar, who gave them a warm send-off before they flew to Kabul. There, he said, the Foreign Ministry gave them a letter of permission to cross the front line into Northern Alliance-held territory in the Panjshir Valley, Massood's domain north of the capital.

To win acceptance on the other side, the journalists had an introduction from an Islamic group in London to Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a Northern Alliance commander in Panjshir with strong contacts to Arab mujahedeen from the days of the Soviet resistance, said Abdullah Abdullah, another close associate of Massood.

Abdullah, who served as Afghan foreign minister until earlier this year, said this facilitated the Arabs' entry into Panjshir. Sayyaf hoped their report could help the alliance's standing in the Muslim world but also warned the commander at the front line, Bismullah Khan, now chief of Afghan army staff, "to be watchful of them," Abdullah said.

Abdullah said he saw the Arabs in Panjshir about 20 days before the assassination. "It was a very brief encounter. When I wind my mind back, I remember their gaze was one of hatred," he said.

The journalists waited for a chance to speak with Massood. When the opportunity came, at his redoubt in the town of Khodja Bahauddin, they had 15 questions — eight of them about bin Laden.

Khalili, now the Afghan ambassador to Turkey, said that as the camera supposedly began rolling, he started to translate the first question for Massood from English — "What is the situation in Afghanistan?" — when a fireball ripped through the room. Massood died, and Khalili spent seven days in a coma.

The death wasn't reported for six days, in fear of undermining the Northern Alliance. By the time of the announcement, the Sept. 11 attacks had transformed the world. Two months later, Massood's once beleaguered forces routed the Taliban with the support of U.S. air power.

U.S. military: Suicide cell in Kabul

Kandahar (AP) - A suicide bomber killed a provincial governor along with his bodyguard and his nephew Sunday in eastern Afghanistan, and the U.S. military warned that a suicide bombing cell is targeting foreign troops in Kabul.

The developments came two days after a car bomber rammed into a U.S. army convoy near the U.S. Embassy, killing 16 people, the worst such attack in the capital.

Afghanistan is facing its worst upsurge in violence since the U.S.-led ouster of the Taliban regime nearly five years ago for hosting Osama bin Laden. While insurgents have stepped attacks across the country, the heaviest fighting has been focused on the south.

NATO said 94 militants were killed in air strikes and ground attacks in Kandahar province's Panjwayi and neighboring Zhari districts late Saturday and early Sunday, pushing the toll from a nine-day counterinsurgency operation there past 420. Five NATO soldiers and 14 British crew of a reconnaissance plane also have died.

The alliance also said two U.S.-led coalition soldiers, working with the Afghan army, had died in combat late Saturday — one in the NATO-led offensive in Panjwayi, the other in neighboring Zabul province. It did not give their nationalities, but most troops in the coalition are American.

Operation Medusa began Sept. 2 in Panjwayi, where hundreds of militants had mobilized just 15 miles west of the main southern city of Kandahar city — the former seat of the Taliban government. It's one of the most intense military confrontations since the ouster of the Taliban.

NATO said in a statement that the latest insurgent casualties were inflicted in four separate engagements using artillery and air strikes. NATO's casualty figures cannot be independently confirmed. Purported Taliban spokesmen have disputed them. The anti-insurgent blitz comes amid concerns that NATO lacks enough troops to succeed in its mission.

In Poland, Gen. Ray Henault, chief of NATO's military committee, said Saturday he would formally ask the alliance's 26 member states on Monday to provide up to 2,500 more troops to supplement the 8,000 mostly British, Canadian and Dutch forces it already has in the volatile region. Sunday's suicide bombing happened in eastern Paktia province.

The attacker, with explosives attached to his body, ran toward a car carrying Gov. Abdul Hakim Taniwal, his nephew and a bodyguard, killing all of them as they left the office in the Paktia capital of Gardez, U.S. and Afghan officials said. Three other people were wounded.

Mohammed Hanif, who claims to speak for the Taliban, claimed responsibility in a satellite phone call to an Associated Press reporter in Pakistan. Hanif said the attacker was an Afghan from Paktia province and threatened more attacks. "Our mujahedeen will conduct similar attacks. We have prepared a group of self-sacrificing attackers," he said.

Taniwal had been governor of Paktia for about one and half years. Before that he was federal minister of mines and industry in the Cabinet of President Hamid Karzai.

Taliban-led militants have increasingly adopted tactics reminiscent of insurgents in Iraq, including suicide attacks. U.S. military spokesman Col. Tom Collins said Sunday that a suicide bombing cell is operating in Kabul with the aim of targeting foreign troops. Collins said he couldn't give further details about the suicide bombing cell, but said it was still working and "remains very much a threat."

"Through our intelligence sources we know there's a cell here in Kabul, at least one, whose primary mission is to seek coalition or international troops and hit them with suicide bombs," he said at a news conference.

He also said the coalition was aware that a suicide bomber was in the city before the Friday's deadly attack, but lacked a description of the attacker or the vehicle he was using.

"The coalition had intelligence that a suicide bomber was lurking in Kabul. What we didn't have was a description of the attacker or license plate for his vehicle, but somehow I believe somewhere out there someone knew this guy and had information that could have saved a lot of lives that day had they reported it," he said.

Meanwhile, in the western province of Farah, more than 100 Taliban fighters raided a government compound, killing two policemen and setting fire to several buildings, provincial police chief Sayed Agha said.

Taliban fighters riding in pickup trucks and firing rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 assault rifles attacked the compound in the town Kalaigar at about 1 a.m. on Sunday. They also burned two rooms of the compound and a health clinic in the town before fleeing.

Agha said the Taliban raid was the first in Kalaigar. Resurgent Taliban fighters have been most active in southern provinces. But attacks have started occurring in the west amid intense NATO military operations targeting Taliban in the south.

Separately, U.S. soldiers killed two suspected militants Sunday in a mortar barrage in the eastern Kunar province's village of Darbart after they had fired on an American-Afghan army patrol, said Command Sgt. Maj. Jimmy Carabello.

25-million-dollar Coca-Cola plant opened in Afghanistan

Kabul (AFP) - President Hamid Karzai formally opened a 25-million-dollar Coca-Cola bottling plant, one of the most significant investments in Afghanistan since the ousting of the Taliban five years ago.

Karzai said it was an endorsement of the government's efforts to push ahead with reconstruction of the war-damaged country. The plant had its first products, which will compete with imports from Pakistan and Iran, on the streets of the capital in January.

Its initial formal opening was postponed in May after riots in which hordes of men rampaged through the city, setting fire to buildings and vehicles after a deadly traffic accident involving a US military vehicle.

The investment by a Dubai-based Afghan family is one of the biggest in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Mobile telecommunications network Roshan has spent about 180 million dollars setting up here.

The Afghan government is trying to attract foreign investment to spur an economy ruined by three decades of war. But the country faces considerable odds, including a resurgent Taliban, widespread corruption and a shattered infrastructure, with even the capital only getting a sporadic supply of electricity.

The Taliban, Regrouped And Rearmed - By Peter Bergen Sunday, September 10, 2006 - KABUL, Afghanistan

The interpreter's hand-held radio crackled with the sound of intercepted Taliban transmissions, and he signaled the infantry patrol to wait while he translated. At 7 a.m. one morning late in the summer, peasants were already out scything wheat, with their children tending fields of pink and white poppies that would soon add to Afghanistan's record-setting opium and heroin supplies. We were 9,000 feet up, in the hamlet of Larzab, in a remote part of Zabul province -- the heart of Talibanland.

Our interpreter, Mohammed, estimated that the Taliban fighters were less than half a mile away. We walked through the fields for 20 more minutes before stopping next to a small hill. The chatter revealed that the Taliban were "watching us and waiting for us to get closer," Maj. Ralph Paredes explained to me as his men radioed to their base the likely coordinates of the hidden fighters. Soldiers back at the base -- a mud-walled compound without electricity or water -- fired mortar rounds over our heads to a hill several hundred meters from our position, where the Taliban might be hiding. We never learned whether they found their target.

Just one more patrol, and one more skirmish, in Afghanistan's war -- a conflict in which the fighting and ferocity are regaining strength with each passing month. Indeed, the U.S. military and NATO are now battling the Taliban on a scale not witnessed since 2001, when the war here began, and are increasingly fighting them in remote areas such as Larzab where the Taliban once roamed freely.

When I traveled in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003, the Taliban threat had receded into little more than a nuisance. But now the movement has regrouped and rearmed. Bolstered by a compliant Pakistani government, hefty cash inflow from the drug trade and a population disillusioned by battered infrastructure and lackluster reconstruction efforts, the Taliban is back -- as is Afghanistan's once forgotten war.

In the past three months alone, coalition forces have killed more than 1,000 Taliban fighters, according to Col. Tom Collins, a U.S. military spokesman, while the religious militia has killed dozens of coalition troops and hundreds of Afghan civilians, spreading a climate of fear throughout the country. And suicide attacks in Afghanistan have risen from single digits two years ago to more than 40 already this year. Most of the victims are civilians -- including more than a dozen bystanders who were killed here Friday when a bomb-laden car struck a convoy of armored U.S. vehicles just 200 yards from the U.S. Embassy; the attack also killed two U.S. soldiers and wounded a third. Half an hour after the blast, I watched as firefighters hosed down the streets, which were littered with shards of blackened metal and singed body parts.

I recently traveled to Afghanistan for three weeks, meeting with government officials, embedding with U.S. soldiers from the 2-4 Infantry and interviewing senior American military officers. I found that while the Taliban may not constitute a major strategic threat to President Hamid Karzai's government, they have become a serious tactical challenge for U.S. and NATO troops, as the war here intensifies. And their threat is only amplified by their ubiquity and invisibility.

"In this place, they are everywhere," explained Mohammed, our interpreter. "They are sitting here as a farmer. Then they are Taliban."

When I visited Zabul province in July, Lt. Col. Frank Sturek was in charge of U.S. military operations there. Sturek, from Aberdeen, Md., earned his insurgent-fighting stripes in Mosul, Iraq, under the tutelage of Lt. Gen. David Petraeus. When I spoke to Sturek, he had recently lost two of his men in firefights with the Taliban. In a nighttime interview conducted by flashlight in the mud compound, Sturek described a two-hour struggle on July 19 against about 120 Taliban who were armed with mortars, recoil-less rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Judging from newly dug graves, Sturek estimated 35 to 40 Taliban had been killed.

Despite their numerous casualties, the Taliban are much more willing than Iraqi insurgents to engage in pitched battles, Sturek said. "These guys will mix it up," he said, "and they use a lot more direct fire." In the five months he had been in Afghanistan, he noted, none of the Taliban fighters his men had fought had ever surrendered.

Echoing all other U.S. officers I interviewed in Afghanistan, Sturek emphasized that the Taliban threat required a political solution, not a military one, and that expanding the U.S. presence and reconstruction efforts into remote areas would win the long-term conflict. "You can win every firefight you want, but the battle is in these villages," he said. "This is where you change the minds of the people -- or at least create a doubt that the Taliban are not preaching the right message."

A political solution is also the mantra of the U.S. commanding officer in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, an intense, intellectual soldier who speaks Mandarin and is on his second tour in the country. Over coffee in his Kabul office, he said that the situation in Afghanistan still looks reasonably optimistic. "I tell everyone don't look at the snapshot," he said. "Look at the movie called Afghanistan."

For Eikenberry, that movie features the democratically elected president and parliament, as well as millions of boys and girls who are newly in school. Indeed, in the most recent poll of Afghan public opinion, released by ABC News in December 2005, 77 percent of Afghans said their country is headed in the right direction.

Of course, a similar poll today might find fewer Afghans with this point of view, given rising dissatisfaction with the Karzai government and growing anti-American sentiment revealed in riots that shook Kabul in May. Eikenberry acknowledges that "the strength and coherence of the Taliban movement is greater than it was a year ago," citing tribal and land disputes and trafficking in narcotics as reasons for the resurgence. He also draws a clear link between reconstruction and violence: "Wherever the roads end, that's where the Taliban starts."

An amnesty program formally begun in 2005 by the Karzai government offers one promising approach to containing the Taliban threat. In Qalat, the provincial capital of Zabul, I witnessed U.S. forces release Mullah Abdul Ali Akundzada, who was accused of sheltering Taliban members and had been arrested near the site where a makeshift bomb had detonated. In a deal brokered by the Karzai government and the U.S. military, Akundzada was handed over to a group of about 30 religious and tribal leaders, who publicly pledged that the released mullah would support the government. In an honor-based society such as Afghanistan, this program is working well. According to Afghan and U.S. officials, only a handful of the more than 1,000 Taliban fighters taking advantage of the amnesty have gone back to fighting the government and coalition forces.

Yet even as the amnesty program shows promise, Afghanistan's ballooning drug trade has succeeded in expanding the Taliban ranks. It is no coincidence that opium and heroin production, which now makes up about half of the Afghan economy, spiked at the same time that the Taliban staged a comeback. A U.S. military official told me that charities and individual donations from the Middle East are also boosting the Taliban's coffers. These twin revenue streams -- drug money and contributions -- allow the Taliban to pay their fighters as much as $100 a month, which compares favorably to the $70 salary of an Afghan police officer. Whatever the source, the Taliban can draw upon significant resources, at least by Afghan standards. One U.S. military raid on a Taliban safe house this year recovered $900,000 in cash.

The Taliban's growing presence in central Afghanistan's Ghazni province -- outside the group's traditional strongholds in the south and east -- is another benchmark of its strength. Nearly half the districts in Ghazni are now under significant Taliban influence, a U.S. military official said. The Taliban units operating there aim to control access to Kabul 100 miles to the north, just one more sign that Taliban forces increasingly move across the country with ease.

But the key to the resurgent Taliban can be summarized in one word: Pakistan. The Pakistani government has proved unwilling or incapable (or both) of clamping down on the religious militia, even though the headquarters of the Taliban and its key allies are in Pakistan. According to a U.S. military official, not one senior Taliban leader has been arrested or killed in Pakistan since 2001 -- nor have any of the top leaders of the militias headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, who are fighting U.S. forces alongside the Taliban.

Amir Haqqani, the leader of the Taliban in Zabul province, "never comes across the border" from Pakistan into Afghanistan, Sturek told me. The Taliban's most important leadership council, the Quetta Shura, is based in the capital of Pakistan's Baluchistan province; the Peshawar Shura is headquartered in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province. In addition, Hekmatyar operates in the tribal areas of Dir and Bajur; Haqqani is based in Waziristan; and al-Qaeda has a presence in Waziristan and Chitral -- all Pakistani regions that border Afghanistan.

Finally, the peace deal announced this month between the Pakistani government and pro-Taliban militants along the Afghan border raises more concerns that such groups will operate more freely on and across the border. A U.S. military official in Afghanistan told me he is "extremely worried" about the pact, through which Pakistan agrees to withdraw army units from the region and will turn over checkpoints to local tribes that are effectively Taliban. And with military force against the Taliban highly unpopular among residents in the border region, the upcoming Pakistani presidential election in 2007 means that even less action will be taken in the months ahead.

Mullah Dadullah, a key Taliban commander, gave two interviews to al-Jazeera in the past year in which he made several illuminating observations about the scale and nature of the insurgency. Dadullah put Taliban forces at about 12,000 fighters -- considerably greater than a U.S. military source's estimate of 7,000 to 10,000, but a number that could have some validity given the numerous part-time Taliban farmer/fighters. Dadullah also stressed the Taliban's "close links" to al-Qaeda. "Our cooperation is ideal," he said, adding that Osama bin Laden is issuing orders to the Taliban. Indeed, a senior U.S. military intelligence official told me that "trying to separate Taliban and al-Qaeda in Pakistan serves no purpose. It's like picking gray hairs out of your head."

Dadullah also noted that "we have 'give and take' with the mujaheddin in Iraq." Considering the rising number of suicide attacks in Afghanistan and the increased use of makeshift bombs, Taliban forces appear to have learned from the Iraqi insurgents. A videotape posted on the Internet by al-Qaeda in May shows how critical Iraqi techniques have become to the Afghan insurgency: The tape shows an Arab suicide bomber in Afghanistan prepping a car bomb, and driving it into an American convoy.

Just as suicide bombings in Iraq had an enormous strategic impact -- from pushing the United Nations out of the country to helping spark a civil war -- such attacks may also plunge Afghanistan into chaos. Already, suicide attacks have made much of southern Afghanistan a no-go area for foreigners and for any reconstruction efforts. According to Hekmat Karzai, head of an independent terrorism research center in Kabul, these attacks "have really instilled fear in the heart of the population." Luckily, for the moment, the suicide attackers in Afghanistan have not been nearly as deadly as those in Iraq. As one U.S. military official explained to me, almost all of the Taliban's suicide bombers are "Pashtun country guys from Pakistan," with little effective training.

The Afghan population remains generally pro-American, and its appetite for more conflict is low after more than two decades of war. However, the risks of a slide into Iraq-style chaos remain. Averting it would require Washington to end the Afghan drug trade and compel Pakistan to crack down on the Taliban warriors' havens. These are both tall orders, but Washington could gain real leverage in the area of reconstruction. So far, it has appropriated only $9 billion for Afghan reconstruction, as compared with $34 billion for Iraq, even though Afghanistan is larger, more populous and has greater infrastructure needs. And of the appropriated amount, only $2.5 billion, a State Department official told me, has been spent.

In the absence of greater U.S. investments in roads, power and water resources, the Taliban will surely prosper and continue to gain adherents. Unless they take decisive action now, U.S. policymakers may be looking back in a few years, asking themselves why they lost Afghanistan despite the promise the country showed after the fall of the Taliban regime.

Bin Laden Trail 'Stone Cold'
U.S. Steps Up Efforts, But Good Intelligence On Ground is Lacking - By Dana Priest and Ann Scott Tyson - Washington Post Sunday, September 10, 2006

The clandestine U.S. commandos whose job is to capture or kill Osama bin Laden have not received a credible lead in more than two years. Nothing from the vast U.S. intelligence world -- no tips from informants, no snippets from electronic intercepts, no points on any satellite image -- has led them anywhere near the al-Qaeda leader, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials.

"The handful of assets we have have given us nothing close to real-time intelligence" that could have led to his capture, said one counterterrorism official, who said the trail, despite the most extensive manhunt in U.S. history, has gone "stone cold."

But in the last three months, following a request from President Bush to "flood the zone," the CIA has sharply increased the number of intelligence officers and assets devoted to the pursuit of bin Laden. The intelligence officers will team with the military's secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and with more resources from the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies.

The problem, former and current counterterrorism officials say, is that no one is certain where the "zone" is. "Here you've got a guy who's gone off the net and is hiding in some of the most formidable terrain in one of the most remote parts of the world surrounded by people he trusts implicitly," said T. McCreary, spokesman for the National Counterterrorism Center. "And he stays off the net and is probably not mobile. That's an extremely difficult problem."

Intelligence officials think that bin Laden is hiding in the northern reaches of the autonomous tribal region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. This calculation is based largely on a lack of activity elsewhere and on other intelligence, including a videotape, obtained exclusively by the CIA and not previously reported, that shows bin Laden walking on a trail toward Pakistan at the end of the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, when U.S. forces came close but failed to capture him.

Many factors have combined in the five years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to make the pursuit more difficult. They include the lack of CIA access to people close to al-Qaeda's inner circle; Pakistan's unwillingness to pursue him; the reemergence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan; the strength of the Iraqi insurgency, which has depleted U.S. military and intelligence resources; and the U.S. government's own disorganization.

But the underlying reality is that finding one person in hiding is difficult under any circumstances. Eric Rudolph, the confessed Olympics and abortion clinic bomber, evaded authorities for five years, only to be captured miles from where he was last seen in North Carolina.

It has been so long since there has been anything like a real close call that some operatives have given bin Laden a nickname: "Elvis," for all the wishful-thinking sightings that have substituted for anything real.

After playing down bin Laden's importance and barely mentioning him for several years, Bush last week repeatedly invoked his name and quoted from his writings and speeches to underscore what Bush said is the continuing threat of terrorism.

Many terrorism experts, however, say the importance of finding bin Laden has diminished since Bush first pledged to capture him "dead or alive" in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Terrorists worldwide have repeatedly shown they no longer need him to organize or carry out attacks, the experts say. Attacks in Europe, Asia and the Middle East were perpetrated by homegrown terrorists unaffiliated with al-Qaeda.

"Will his capture stop terrorism? No," Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), vice chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a recent interview. "But in terms of a message to the world, it's a huge message."

Despite a lack of progress, at CIA headquarters bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are still the most wanted of the High Value Targets, referred to as "HVT 1 and 2." The CIA station in Kabul still offers a briefing to VIP visitors that declares: "We are here for the hunt!" -- a reminder that finding bin Laden is a top priority.

Gary Berntsen, the former CIA officer who led the first and last hunt for bin Laden at Tora Bora, in December 2001, says, "This could all end tomorrow." One unsolicited walk-in. One tribesman seeking to collect the $25 million reward. One courier who would rather his kids grow up in the United States. One dealmaker, "and this could all change," Berntsen said.

On the videotape obtained by the CIA, bin Laden is seen confidently instructing his party how to dig holes in the ground to lie in undetected at night. A bomb dropped by a U.S. aircraft can be seen exploding in the distance. "We were there last night," bin Laden says without much concern in his voice. He was in or headed toward Pakistan, counterterrorism officials think.

That was December 2001. Only two months later, Bush decided to pull out most of the special operations troops and their CIA counterparts in the paramilitary division that were leading the hunt for bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for war in Iraq, said Flynt L. Leverett, then an expert on the Middle East at the National Security Council.

"I was appalled when I learned about it," said Leverett, who has become an outspoken critic of the administration's counterterrorism policy. "I don't know of anyone who thought it was a good idea. It's very likely that bin Laden would be dead or in American custody if we hadn't done that."

Several officers confirmed that the number of special operations troops was reduced in March 2002. White House spokeswoman Michele Davis said she would not comment on the specific allegation. "Military and intelligence units move routinely in and out," she said. "The intelligence and military community's hunt for bin Laden has been aggressive and constant since the attacks."

The Pakistani intelligence service, notoriously difficult to trust but also the service with the best access to al-Qaeda circles, is convinced bin Laden is alive because no one has ever intercepted or heard a message mourning his death. "Al-Qaeda will mourn his death and will retaliate in a big way. We are pretty sure Osama is alive," Pakistan's interior minister, Aftab Khan Sherpao, said in a recent interview with The Washington Post.

Pakistani intelligence officials also say they think bin Laden remains actively involved in al-Qaeda activities. They cite the interrogations of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a key planner of the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, and Abu-Faraj al-Libbi, who served as a communications conduit between bin Laden and senior al-Qaeda operatives until his capture last year.

Libbi and Ghailani, who was arrested in Pakistan in July 2004, were the last two people taken into custody to have met with and taken orders from Zawahiri and to hear directly from bin Laden. "Both Ghailani and Libbi were informed that Osama was well and alive and in the picture by none other than Zawahiri himself," one Pakistani intelligence official said.

Two Pakistani intelligence officials recently interviewed in Karachi said that the last time they received firsthand information on bin Laden was in April 2003, when an arrested al-Qaeda leader, Tawfiq bin Attash, disclosed having met him in the Khost province of Afghanistan three months earlier.

Attash, who helped plan the 2000 USS Cole bombing, told interrogators that the meeting took place in the Afghan mountains about two hours from the town of Khost.

By then, Pakistan was the United States' best bet for information after an infusion of funds from the U.S. intelligence community, particularly in the area of expensive NSA eavesdropping equipment.

"For technical intelligence ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) works hand in hand with the NSA," a senior Pakistani intelligence official said. "The U.S. assistance in building Pakistan's capabilities for technical intelligence since 9/11 is superb."

Since early 2002, the United States has stationed a small number of personnel from the NSA and the CIA near where bin Laden may be hiding. They are embedded with counterterrorism units of the Pakistan army's elite Special Services Group, according to senior Pakistani intelligence officials.

The NSA and other specialists collect imagery and electronic intercepts that their CIA counterparts then share with the Pakistani units in the tribal areas and with the province of Baluchistan to the south.

But even with sophisticated technology, the local geography presents formidable obstacles. In a land of dead-end valleys, high peaks and winding ridge lines, it is easy to hide within the miles of caves and deep ravines, or to live unnoticed in mud-walled compounds barely distinguishable from the surrounding terrain.

The Afghan-Pakistan border is about 1,500 miles. Pakistan deploys 70,000 troops there. Its army had never entered the area until October 2001, more than a half century after Pakistan's founding.

A Muslim country where many consider bin Laden a hero, Pakistan has grown increasingly reluctant to help the U.S. search. The army lost its best source of intelligence in 2004, after it began raids inside the tribal areas. Scouts with blood ties to the tribes ceased sharing information for fear of retaliation.

They had good reason. At least 23 senior anti-Taliban tribesmen have been assassinated in South and North Waziristan since May 2005. "Al-Qaeda footprints were found everywhere," Interior Minister Sherpao said in a recent interview. "They kidnapped and chopped off heads of at least seven of these pro-government tribesmen."

Pakistani and U.S. counterterrorism and military officials admit that Pakistan has now all but stopped looking for bin Laden. "The dirty little secret is, they have nothing, no operations, without the Paks," one former counterterrorism officer said.

Last week, Pakistan announced a truce with the Taliban that calls on the insurgent Afghan group to end armed attacks inside Pakistan and to stop crossing into Afghanistan to fight the government and international troops. The agreement also requires foreign militants to leave the tribal area of North Waziristan or take up a peaceable life there.

In Afghanistan, the hunt for bin Laden has been upstaged by the reemergence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and by Afghan infighting for control of territory and opium poppy cropland.

Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who commanded U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2003, said he thinks bin Laden kept close to the border, not wandering far into either country. That belief is still current among military and intelligence analysts.

"We believe that he held to a pretty narrow range of within 15 kilometers of the border," said Vines, who now commands the XVIII Airborne Corps, "so that if the Pakistanis, for whatever reason, chose to do something to him, he could cross into Afghanistan and vice versa."

He said he thinks bin Laden's protection force "had a series of outposts with radios that could alert each other" if helicopters were coming or other troop movements were evident.

Pakistani military officials in Wana, the capital of South Waziristan, described bin Laden as having three rings of security, each ring unaware of the movements and identities of the other. Sometimes they communicated with specially marked flashlights. Sometimes they dressed as women to avoid detection by U.S. spy planes.

Pakistan will permit only small numbers of U.S. forces to operate with its troops at times and, because their role is so sensitive politically, it officially denies any U.S. presence. A frequent complaint from U.S. troops is that they have too little to do. The same complaint is also heard from U.S. forces in Afghanistan, where there were few targets to go after.

Although the hunt for bin Laden has depended to a large extent on technology, until recently unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were in short supply, especially when the war in Iraq became a priority in 2003.

In July 2003, Vines said that U.S. forces under his command thought they were close to striking bin Laden, but had only one drone to send over three possible routes he might take. "A UAV was positioned on the route that was most likely, but he didn't go that way," Vines said. "We believed that we were within a half-hour of possibly getting him, but nothing materialized."

Faced with the most sophisticated technology in the world, bin Laden has gone decidedly low-tech. His 23 video or audiotapes in the last five years are thought to have been hand-carried to news outlets or nearby mail drops by a series of couriers who know nothing about the contents of their deliveries or the real identity of the sender, a simple method used by spies and drug traffickers for centuries.

"They are really good at operational security," said Ben Venzke, chief executive officer of IntelCenter, a private company that analyzes terrorist information and has obtained, analyzed and published all bin Laden's communiques. "They are very good at having enough cut-outs" to move videos into circulation without detection. "It's some of the simplest things to do."

Bureaucratic battles slowed down the hunt for bin Laden for the first two or three years, according to officials in several agencies, with both the Pentagon and the CIA accusing each other of withholding information. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's sense of territoriality has become legendary, according to these officials.

In early November 2002, for example, a CIA drone armed with a Hellfire missile killed a top al-Qaeda leader traveling through the Yemeni desert. About a week later, Rumsfeld expressed anger that it was the CIA, not the Defense Department, that had carried out the successful strike.

"How did they get the intel?" he demanded of the intelligence and other military personnel in a high-level meeting, recalled one person knowledgeable about the meeting. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then director of the National Security Agency and technically part of the Defense Department, said he had given it to them.

"Why aren't you giving it to us?" Rumsfeld wanted to know. Hayden, according to this source, told Rumsfeld that the information-sharing mechanism with the CIA was working well. Rumsfeld said it would have to stop.

A CIA spokesman said Hayden, now the CIA director, does not recall this conversation. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said, "The notion that the department would do anything that would jeopardize the success of an operation to kill or capture bin Laden is ridiculous." The NSA continues to share intelligence with the CIA and the Defense Department.

At that time, Rumsfeld was putting in place his own aggressive plan, led by the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), to dominate the hunt for bin Laden and other terrorists. The overall special operations budget has grown by 60 percent since 2003 to $8 billion in fiscal year 2007.

Rows and rows of temporary buildings sprang up on SOCOM's parking lots in Tampa as Rumsfeld refocused the mission of a small group of counterterrorism experts from long-term planning for the war on terrorism to manhunting. The group "went from 20 years to 24-hour crisis-mode operations," one former special operations officer said. "It went from planning to manhunting."

In 2004, Rumsfeld finally won the president's approval to put SOCOM in charge of the "Global War on Terrorism."

Today, however, no one person is in charge of the overall hunt for bin Laden with the authority to direct covert CIA operations to collect intelligence and to dispatch JSOC units. Some counterterrorism officials find this absurd. "There's nobody in the United States government whose job it is to find Osama bin Laden!" one frustrated counterterrorism official shouted. "Nobody!"

"We work by consensus," explained Brig. Gen. Robert L. Caslen Jr., who recently stepped down as deputy director of counterterrorism under the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "In order to find Osama bin Laden, certain departments will come together. . . . It's not that effective, or we'd find the guy, but in terms of advancing United States power for that mission, I think that process is effective."

But Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the JSOC commander since 2003, has become the de facto leader of the hunt for bin Laden and developed a good working relationship with the CIA to the extent that he recently was able to persuade the former station chief in Kabul to become his special assistant. He asks for targets from the CIA, and it tries to comply. "We serve the military," one intelligence officer said.

McChrystal's troops have shuttled between Afghanistan and Iraq, where they succeeded in killing al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and killed or captured dozens of his followers.

Under McChrystal, JSOC has improved its ability to quickly turn captured documents, computers and cellphones into leads and then to act upon them, while waiting for more analysis from CIA or SOCOM.

Industry experts and military officers say they are being aided by computer forensic field kits that let technicians retrieve information from surviving hard drives, cellphones and other electronic devices, as was the case in the Zarqawi strike.

McChrystal, who has commanded JSOC since 2003, now has the authority to go after bin Laden inside Pakistan without having to seek permission first, two U.S. officials said.

"The authority," one knowledgeable person said, "follows the target," meaning that if the target is bin Laden, the stakes are high enough for McChrystal to decide any action on his own. The understanding is that U.S. units will not enter Pakistan, except under extreme circumstances, and that Pakistan will deny giving them permission.

Such was the case in early January, when JSOC troops clandestinely entered the village of Saidgai, two officials familiar with the operation said, and Pakistan protested.

A week later, acting on what Pakistani intelligence officials said was information developed out of Libbi's interrogation, the CIA ordered a missile strike against a house in the village of Damadola, about 120 miles northwest of Islamabad, where Pakistani and American officials thought Zawahiri to be hiding.

The missile killed 13 civilians and several suspected terrorists. But Zawahiri was not among them. The strike "could have changed the destiny of the war on terror. Zawahiri was 100 percent sure to visit Damadola . . . but he disappeared at the last moment," one Pakistani intelligence official said.

Tens of thousands of Pakistanis staged an angry anti-American protest near Damadola, shouting, "Death to America!"

"Once again, we have lost track of Ayman al-Zawahiri," the Pakistani intelligence official said in a recent interview. "He keeps popping on television screens. It's miserable, but we don't know where he or his boss are hiding."

Contributing to this report were staff writers Bradley Graham, Thomas E. Ricks, Josh White, Griff Witte and Allan Lengel in Washington, Kamran Khan in Islamabad and John Lancaster in Wana, Pakistan, and staff researchers Julie Tate and Robert E. Thomason.

Officer resigns over 'grotesquely clumsy' war in Afghanistan

London (AFP) - An officer has resigned from the army in protest at its "grotesquely clumsy" campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Captain Leo Docherty was aide-de-camp to Colonel Charlie Knaggs, a senior commander in the task force in southern Afghanistan, but quit last month after becoming disillusioned with its strategy in Helmand province, The Sunday Times said.

The approach is "a textbook case of how to screw up a counter-insurgency," Docherty was quoted as saying. "All those people whose homes have been destroyed and sons killed are going to turn against the British," he said.

"Weve been grotesquely clumsy. We've said well be different to the Americans who were bombing and strafing villages, then behaved exactly like them," he said.

"Weve deviated spectacularly from the original plan," Docherty was quoted as saying. "The plan was to secure the provincial capital Lashkar Gah, initiate development projects and enable governance ... During this time, the insecure northern part of Helmand would be contained: troops would not be sucked in to a problem unsolvable by military means alone."

Docherty said the plan "fell by the wayside" because of pressure from the governor of Helmand, who feared the Taliban were toppling his district chiefs in northern towns, according to The Sunday Times.

The military paid tribute Saturday to those killed in a plane crash in Afghanistan as they counted the cost of September, already the deadliest month they have sustained since March 2003.

In total, 22 British troops have been killed so far this month as they tackle insurgents on two fronts: 19 in Afghanistan, including 14 when a Nimrod reconnaissance plane crashed, and three others in attacks in Iraq.

According to a study by the Royal Statistical Society published in the New Scientist magazine, Afghanistan has become more dangerous than Iraq for Western troops since fighters loyal to the deposed Taliban regime renewed their insurgency.

NATO military chiefs meeting in Warsaw on Saturday pressed alliance member states to send more men and equipment to Afghanistan.

Some 4,000 British troops make up the majority of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force deployed in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar.

UK charity warns of Afghan famine - BBC News / Sunday, 10 September 2006

Millions of people in Afghanistan face starvation after a drought destroyed crops, a UK charity has warned. A Christian Aid survey of 66 villages suggests farmers in the worst affected areas have lost all their produce.

The aid agency is urging the British government and international bodies to give money to prevent people starving in north and west Afghanistan.

The crop failure comes as fighting continues in the south between the Nato-led troops and the Taleban.

Most of the water has dried up in the provinces of Herat, Badghis and Ghor, and the wheat harvest is down by 90% to 100% in parts of Faryab province, the study indicates. The Afghan government has set up a drought appeal which needs £41m.

John Davison, from Christian Aid, said: "This week the world will clearly be remembering the terrible events of 11 September 2001 in New York and Washington. "We would ask them also to remember that five years ago, there was a drought in Afghanistan that threatened the lives of five million people.

"While much has happened on the international scene over this period, once again we are facing a serious drought threatening the lives and livelihoods of millions in Afghanistan."

The survey indicates those most at risk from starvation are children, pregnant women, landless families and the elderly. Sultan Maqsood Fazel, from Christian Aid in Afghanistan, said the situation would become very serious within a few months.

Christian Aid estimates more than a million people in Herat, Ghor, Farah, Badghis and Faryab are affected by the drought.

The UK's Department for International Development (DFID) described the report as "worrying". "It paints a more serious picture than reports to date from the UN, although it highlights the same parts of the country," said a spokesman.

Top Canada reporter hit for backing Afghan mission

OTTAWA, Sept 8 (Reuters) - One of Canada's top television reporters has been suspended from her job for praising the country's increasingly troubled military mission in Afghanistan, La Presse newspaper reported on Friday.

Christine St-Pierre, a veteran Ottawa correspondent for French-language public broadcaster Radio-Canada, wrote an open letter to Canada's 2,300 troops telling them to ignore mounting criticism of the mission.

Five Canadian soldiers were killed last weekend, prompting ever louder calls for Ottawa to review the mission. One opposition party wants the troops to come back next February, two years ahead of schedule.

"We owe you all our respect and our unfailing support ... dear soldiers, your tears are not in vain, your tears are brave," St-Pierre wrote in the letter, which La Presse published on Thursday.

Radio-Canada suspended her for breaching internal rules that stipulate employees are not allowed to express their opinions on controversial issues, La Presse said. No one at Radio-Canada was immediately available for comment.

St-Pierre told the paper she knew she had gone too far and said she could no longer be objective when it came to reporting on events in Afghanistan.

"I don't think I'll be covering this story again," she said.

The Afghan mess - COLIN ALEXANDER – Letter to Globe and Mail 9/10/06

Ottawa -- We should take the caring, peacekeeping patriots Jack Layton and Ujjal Dosanjh at their word. Give them a list of questions to be answered. Find a Taliban prisoner who can be released to act as their interpreter, and have the Canadian Forces drop them off in Taliban territory in southern Afghanistan. If they come back with a Taliban manifesto, that would be useful regardless of whether it forms the basis for further talks. If they don't come back, well, that, too, would give us a useful answer.

[Disclaimer: The content of this news bulletin does not necessarily reflect the view or policy of the Afghan Government, unless specifically stated as such. The collection of articles and commentaries from Afghan and international news sources is provided for informational purposes, and accuracy of the news is the responsibility of the original source.]