Veteran fighter: Kandahar may fall, but 'this is not the end of the Taliban'

By LAURA KING
AP Special Correspondent

QUETTA, Pakistan – For a man whose world was falling apart, his demeanor was calm, even relaxed – fingering prayer beads, flexing callused bare feet, smiling the occasional gap-toothed smile.

He'd been a Taliban fighter for five years, a veteran of the Islamic militia's long and bloody conquest of Afghanistan. He was a fiery young foot soldier when he marched with them out of Kandahar, the Taliban birthplace – the same city he now expected to defend to the death.

"If God does not want the Taliban to keep this place, that is his will," said Mahmoud Ahmed Muttawakil, bulky and heavily bearded, shifting to adjust his flowing black turban. "If God wants me to die there, that is also his will."

Kandahar, the Taliban's home base and final stronghold, sits squarely in the crosshairs of one of the greatest concentrations of firepower of the 7-week-old U.S.-led onslaught against Osama bin Laden and his Taliban protectors.

The southern Afghan city has been the target of intense American airstrikes, and U.S. Marines a week ago established a desert air base from which they have been conducting reconnaissance patrols and providing support to anti-Taliban forces.

Muttawakil, interviewed at the home of a friend in the Pakistani city of Quetta, had slipped across the border two days earlier on what he said was Taliban business. Associates, who said he had probably been procuring medical supplies, later confirmed he had re-crossed the frontier, headed back to Kandahar.

A native of the dusty Pakistani tribal town of Pishin, Muttawakil left home and family in 1996, at the age of 29, to join a new movement he believed upheld the true ideals of Islam – the Taliban.

Neighbors and relatives in Pishin confirmed that Muttawakil, like so many other young Pashtun tribesmen from the border zone, had gone to Afghanistan five years earlier, fired by fervor for the purist Taliban way of thinking. As the years passed, some of them came home to Pishin again. But not Muttawakil.

Now 34, he has a post in the Taliban defense ministry – and few illusions about the fate that awaits his adopted hometown of Kandahar, his base since he left Pakistan.

"Of course America has all the strength – it is a superpower," Muttawakil said, shrugging. "But in the end, we will have our revenge. This is not the end of the Taliban. Not at all."

Genial through most of an hourlong discussion – to the point of noting apologetically that Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month, prevented him from offering tea or other refreshment – Muttawakil glowered when asked whether the Taliban's association with bin Laden, prime suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, had been a mistake.

"How can it have been a mistake to defend another Muslim?" he said fiercely. "It would be better if more Muslims understood this. We would willingly stand by Osama again. And Osama will survive this."

If Kandahar falls, he said, the Taliban will regroup in the steep cave-cratered hills north of the city, relentlessly harrying whomever its new masters might be.

"That is what we know how to do, go to the mountains," he said. "When we are there, no one who is our enemy will ever be able to feel safe."

If the Americans or anti-Taliban forces succeed in killing bin Laden or the Taliban supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, supporters of the U.S.-led coalition must fear for their own lives, he warned.

"We will find a way, or our brothers will find one, to take revenge on all of them – (British Prime Minister) Tony Blair, (U.N. Secretary-General) Kofi Annan, all of them," said Muttawakil. "If it takes a long time, a very long time, this does not matter."

Over the past three weeks, the Taliban have lost nearly all their territory, together with Afghan capital, Kabul. Even before the militia has been vanquished, anti-Taliban forces have begun talks on the shape of a new broad-based government for Afghanistan.

Asked whether the harshness of Taliban rule might have contributed to their downfall, Muttawakil laughed.

Under the Taliban's unyielding interpretation of sharia, or Islamic law, women were beaten if they ventured out without all-concealing burqas, men had to wear beards of proscribed length and pray five times a day, limbs were amputated for thievery and adulterers were stoned to death.

"It is not a question of Taliban rules being cruel," he said. "This isn't the law of the Taliban. It's the law of God, and the law of God does not change."

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