Word: achakzai
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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...Karzai once was in Oruzgan - he was rescued from a Taliban ambush six weeks back by U.S. choppers - but there are some doubts that he's still there. One reliable Pakistani tribal elder told TIME that Karzai is making his sat-phone broadcasts from a secluded house in Toba Achakzai, a village on the safe side of the Pakistan-Afghan border - and several hundred miles from Oruzgan. "Karzai and his men - these are not fighting people," says Malik Sarwar Khan Kakar, the tribal elder...
Meanwhile, tribal chieftains such as Achakzai have their own game plan against the Taliban. In Quetta, the elders of the 23 million-strong Pashtun tribe, which is spread across western Pakistan and most of Afghanistan, are moving to bring back Mohammed Zahir Shah, the deposed Afghan King who is living in Rome. In high-walled and guarded villas, these elders receive a stream of whispering chieftains, Afghan ex-army generals, mujahedin commanders and Pakistani officials--all eager recruits for an uprising against the Taliban. "It's happening so fast," says Hamad Karzai, an influential Afghan Pashtun elder who is backing...
...Chaman border, tribal leader Achakzai listens to a village cleric oozing messianic praise of the Taliban. When the mullah gathers his robes and exits from the dark, carpeted room into a courtyard of flies and the blinding white light of the desert, Achakzai says with a grin: "Once the Taliban falls, that mullah will be cheering the return of Zahir Shah." Loyalty is something the Taliban can no longer count on among all its fellow tribesmen...