Word: chaman
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...Mamabaidullah's office overlooks one of this battle's front lines: Spin Boldak's main border checkpoint, a notorious smugglers' route from the Pakistani town of Chaman. Entering or leaving the country often requires no papers at all. "It's impossible to control," says Khalid Pashtoon, spokesman for Kandahar Governor Gul Agha Sherzai. It's also the Taliban's gateway to revenge. Following their ouster from Afghanistan, most Taliban leaders found sanctuary among fellow ethnic Pashtuns in Pakistan's lawless Baluchistan and North-West Frontier Province (N.W.F.P.) regions. Pakistani authorities have arrested nearly 500 suspected al-Qaeda members, but Karzai...
...Musharraf has praised his security forces for capturing 10 Taliban leaders. He also sent Pakistani soldiers into parts of N.W.F.P. where they hadn't been "for over a century." But that late-June campaign stemmed from reports that bin Laden was in the area. A Pakistani intelligence source near Chaman says his orders are "not to harass nor appease" the Taliban but to let them...
...with funding and training by Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI). (Accusations persist that rogue ISI agents or ex-agents still back the Taliban.) The border provinces are controlled by Jamiat Ulema Islam, an extremist party that openly harbors the Taliban. In Quetta, 110 kilometers southeast of Chaman, men roam the streets wearing the distinctive black or white robes and black or white turbans characteristic of the Taliban. "We feel relaxed and safe here," says a young Talib. A local cleric says Taliban commanders meet regularly in the town to plan raids into their former domain. Foot soldiers...
...base in Kandahar. As an added advantage, it was just 40 kilometers from the Pakistani border, close enough for a quick getaway?and to receive orders from two key Taliban commanders, Mullah Bradar and Mullah Abdul Razzak, who Afghan intelligence sources say are hiding in the Pakistani cities of Chaman and Quetta...
...persists. In Peshawar, thousands of empty Pakistani passports were stolen last December, and many are now thought to be in the pockets of Taliban and al-Qaeda fugitives. Several senior Taliban commanders, including former Interior Minister Mullah Abdul Razzak, are living openly in the southern Pakistani border town of Chaman with their wives and families. Western diplomats express frustration over this, but they reckon Pakistan may be saving the ex-Taliban clergymen, who still have backing in southern Afghanistan, as a political option in case the interim Kabul government of Hamid Karzai unravels...