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Taliban allies say pullback only a strategic withdrawal

The Taliban's rear guard allies Tuesday dismissed the surprise rout of Kabul as a strategic withdrawal so hardy fighters could wage guerrilla war in the mountains of their Kandahar heartland.

"We will never be defeated," Maulana Sami-ul-Haq said at his religious school. "The opposition can take cities but that only scatters them. They'll fight among themselves until they are too weak to continue."

Haq, who heads the multiparty Afghan Defense Council in Pakistan, said Taliban troops would dig into cave-laced mountain redoubts, safe from air strikes, and apply tactics which humbled elite Soviet Red Army units.

"The Taliban themselves allowed the opposition to take over cities," he said. He added that it was a victory that lightly armed troops held Kabul for nearly six weeks in spite of massive air strikes.

Across town, Haji Zaman Gham Sherek of the Eastern Alliance which is fighting the Taliban near Jalalabad, shrugged off Taliban optimism as empty bluster.

He said Taliban and the Arab fighters with them would put up fierce resistance against opposing Afghan troops, backed by US and allied air support, but he predicted they would last no more than a few months.

"How long can they hold out in the mountains?" he asked. "They'll need food, ammunition. They will fight hard because it's a matter of life and death for them. But in the end, they will lose."

While victorious anti-Taliban units celebrated noisily in Kabul, the mood was subdued in Pesh-awar, across the Khyber Pass, where anxious Pakistanis waited to see how events would play out.

In this city of two million which has sheltered a million Afghan refugee for 20 years, feelings are complex.

"People are not happy but rather sad and confused," said Haji Mohammed Adeel, a local stalwart of the moderate National Awami Party, whose family dates back at least seven generations in Peshawar.

Peshawaris want Afghans to go home, he said, but only to a stable situation with a broad-based government that can avert civil war.

"Most people are unhappy with the Americans because so many innocent Afghans were killed by bombing, but they are also disappointed by the Taliban," Adeel said.

"The Taliban's image is gone, the belief that they cannot be conquered," he said. "Everyone thought they would fight to their last breath."

If they were going to sneak away in the dead of night without firing a shot, he added, why did they stay so long in Kabul and expose the people to so much allied bombing?

Adeel added, "Who would have thought they would sneak away in the dead of night without firing a shot?"

He predicted that few Pakistanis would sympathize with guerrilla tactics if the Taliban fought from the mountains.

"Guerrilla war works when you are fighting for freedom against an occupying army like in Palestine, but this is not a freedom fight," he said. "It is people in caves laying mines, blowing up things."

Whatever happens, he concluded, the conflict was far from over.

The fast-moving events pose critical problems for the Pakistan government, which has long been leery of the disparate warlords who make up the Northern Alliance.

President Pervez Musharraf is lobbying hard for an internationally monitored interim government to assure a stable transition that lessens the chance of renewed infighting.

"Pakistan does not want the North Alliance -- only the Americans, the Russians and the Indians want them," said Rashid-ul-Haq's, Sami-ul-Haq's son and deputy. "They will resist giving them power."

He claimed that most senior Pakistani officers supported the Taliban, putting severe pressure on Musharraf not to alienate his officer corps.

Taliban supporters gathered in the thousands at the headquarters of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islami, the Party of Islamic Clerics, to lay out strategy in the face of sudden new developments.

"It is holy war now," said Abdul Shakoor, a JUI leader in Peshawar. "Things have totally changed. Before we were fighting with arms. Now our weapon is God. All Muslims everywhere are behind us."

The mass meeting decided to raise money for the Taliban's stand in Kandahar and to send thousands of recruits across the border to join their ranks.

Also, he said, they would provide sanctuary for the Taliban in tribal areas along the border over which Pakistani authorities have little control.

"We will force Pakistan to leave the coalition with the United States, and we will tell every child in schools and in homes that they should hate the Americans."
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