Word: kabul
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...militiamen killed by Afghan soldiers during a battle last month. These Taliban, Mamabaidullah says, had been hiding in Pakistan and returned to attack a government office in a nearby village. Officially, 40 Taliban died in the ensuing firefight, though a source present at the encounter and an official in Kabul both put the death toll, which included seven Afghan soldiers, nearer to 90. It was one of the Taliban's biggest defeats since they were toppled in December 2001. Mamabaidullah had these bodies buried here to send a message "that if anyone comes into Afghanistan to kill or make problems...
...gradually, like a photograph developing." The big picture, according to Kandahar's police chief Brigadier General Mohammed Akram, is that "the Taliban are stronger now than at any time since the fall of their government." These neo-Taliban number in the "thousands," according to an Afghan security official in Kabul. They operate primarily out of Pakistan, guided by many of the same men?including supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar?who ran Afghanistan's ultra-orthodox theocracy from 1995 through 2001, when the group harbored Osama bin Laden and lent eager support to al-Qaeda. While maintaining close ties...
...suspected al-Qaeda members, but Karzai, among others, has charged that the U.S.'s avowed ally has shown little inclination to apprehend top-level Taliban, even when provided addresses where they could be found. "If we had sincere and honest cooperation from Pakistan," charges the security official in Kabul, "there'd be no Taliban threat in Afghanistan." After the battle near Spin Boldak, Mamabaidullah made the point less delicately by piling more than 20 bodies onto a dump truck, driving to the border and depositing them on Pakistani soil...
Such informal understandings, however, can evaporate when a regime cracks down or a missionary becomes more assertive. In August 2001, Afghanistan's Taliban arrested Heather Mercer, 24, and Dayna Curry, 29, who had traveled from a Texas church to work for a group called Shelter Germany in Kabul. During their three-month incarceration, subsequent rescue and visit with President Bush in the Rose Garden, the press referred to them as "Christian aid workers," implying that they were engaged solely in humanitarian ministry and that their jailers' claim that they were proselytizing was false...
Such sentiments are noble enough. But the women's acts were unpopular with a spectrum of Kabul aid groups running from secular workers to fellow Evangelicals. "They broke every rule in the book," says Seiple, the former State Department religious-freedom ambassador. "They were women in a patriarchal society, didn't know the language [well], didn't know the culture and were counseled against doing this by other Christians." Says "Kay," a 13-year veteran of evangelical missions in another Muslim capital who reports that the incident eventually hampered her own work: "I'm sorry that they suffered, but they...