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MASSOUD HOSSAINI / Associated Press, Pool
A Marine stands guard in the Afghan town of Marjah, Helmand province, as the American-led offensive is under way.
U.S. experts see signs of Taliban in transition
KABUL, Afghanistan - A decade ago, when the Taliban controlled the Afghan government, their militiamen - barely motivated, untrained conscripts - tried for five years to seize control of the entire country from more moderate forces but didn't succeed, even with the help of Osama bin Laden's Arab and other foreign volunteers.
Today, although the United States and more than three dozen NATO allies and other countries are supporting Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the Taliban dominate a growing swath of territory, and their power trumps the government's in three-quarters of the country.
Although they're often portrayed as mindless fanatics, the militant Islamists' "life experience" from their years in the wilderness, their study of American military tactics, and their analysis of the Karzai government's shortcomings have helped reverse their fortunes, U.S. intelligence experts say.
With President Obama sending 30,000 additional American troops to knock the Taliban off-balance and a U.S.-led offensive under way in Helmand province, a better understanding of today's Taliban is central to the effort to defeat them and thus enable American troops to start leaving Afghanistan in the summer of 2011.
While much is made of the recent arrests of Taliban leaders in Pakistan and the deaths of others in U.S. drone attacks, the group appears to be a movement in transition, with greater sophistication along with limited central control and considerable autonomy for its local commanders in Afghanistan.
Western intelligence officials cite varied signs of the "new" Taliban:
After every military operation, top Taliban leaders - who intelligence officials think move along the Afghan-Pakistani border but sometimes retreat to Karachi and other Pakistani cities - routinely run circles around the Karzai government with rapid-response public relations.
Some Taliban still fight as they did a decade ago, in flip-flops and baggy pants, but the hard-core "Taliban cavalry" is equipped with North Face jackets, good boots, warm clothing, and swift motorbikes bought in Pakistan.
The Taliban made 8,000 improvised explosive devices last year, an astonishing rate of almost 22 a day. "An enemy that can generate 8,000 IEDs and bring 8,000 IEDs to bear and have a major effect, we ought to hire the J-4, the logistician," said a top general with the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force.
Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar issued a 67-article code of conduct for his fighters last summer, ordering them to protect the civilian population.
Based on debriefings of 4,000 Taliban detainees captured over the past four to five years, the ISAF general concludes that the insurgents are motivated to seize power either by conquest or by negotiation and to establish the rule of sharia, or Islamic law, in the areas they control.
The Taliban "have totally changed," said Vahid Mojdeh, a former Taliban foreign ministry official who monitors the movement. "They've totally put behind them their international agenda" of spreading Islamist revolution "and now are just focused on Afghanistan."
To communicate without cell phones, which they fear expose them to spies, the Taliban use VHF radio-relay networks of hundreds of small antennas linked to solar panels. The equipment is bought off the shelf in Pakistan or stolen from NATO trucks and assembled in the field.
"It's extremely sophisticated," the ISAF general, who could not be identified under the terms of the briefing, said in an interview. On the other hand, he said, Taliban codes are "pretty easy to break."
Taliban policies also have become sophisticated. Mojdeh said that in the last year the insurgents had stopped burning down schools, and they no longer opposed vaccination campaigns for children or health clinics.
"There's a new generation. They are familiar with computers. They communicate with text messages. They're in favor of education," he said. Unlike the Taliban of the 1990s, he said, "they are no longer all illiterates."
Drawing on insurgent tactics from the war in Iraq, the Afghan civil war in the 1990s, Pakistani trainers, and al-Qaeda operatives, the Taliban have developed a plan for civilian governance of regions they control, appointing a governor - usually from another region, to avoid local tribal rivalries - a military commander, a financial officer, and a judge.
However, the Taliban also have adopted deadly new tactics such as recruiting pupils from madrassas - Islamic schools - as suicide bombers. Recruiters observe the students and "see who's the more emotional," Mojdeh said. They also seek volunteers from among those who have lost family members to U.S. or Afghan government attacks.
The Afghan National Directorate for Security estimates there are at least 1,000 mobile insurgent training centers in Pakistan's seven tribal agencies.
To a great extent, though, the Taliban remain motivated by revenge. The massacre in 2001 of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban detainees at the hands of an Uzbek warlord in northern Afghanistan still motivates Taliban to fight.
"Those kinds of things thicken the hatred and cause more people to join," the senior ISAF general said.
