Other accounts depict gathering panic among the population and the disappearance from major cities of many Taliban soldiers and police, and raise the possibility of a mass defection by Taliban fighters.
The accumulating signs could indicate the beginning of a wider disintegration of Taliban power, but because the reports are scattered, and in some cases from refugees arriving in Pakistan who are hostile to the Taliban, it is uncertain whether the Taliban are starting to break up as a governing force or are regrouping for a guerrilla war.
Prospect of defections
A top official of the anti-Taliban alliance based in northern Afghanistan said Wednesday that dozens of senior Taliban officers commanding as many as 10,000 soldiers may be willing to switch loyalties, some of them based in key provinces.
“They are willing to change sides today or wait until something starts and then coordinate their efforts with us,” said Abdullah Abdullah, nominally the foreign minister of the Northern Alliance.
“It’s quite possible there will be a popular uprising in Kabul before we can move forces into Kabul.”
He also claimed to have received pledges of continuing support from Iran and Russia, as well as to have held his first meeting with American officials.
“We are discussing every aspect of the present situation and cooperation,” he said, without disclosing the meeting’s location.
The alliance, which has fought a long and losing war against the Taliban, has earned a reputation for exaggerating its claims. There was no way to tell whether Abdullah was overstating the extent to which Taliban fighters could be tempted into a mass defection–a development that would dramatically alter the strategic landscape in the country. Other alliance commanders suggested Abdullah was making exaggerated claims.
Taken with the flurry of reports that have leaked out of the isolated country in the past 48 hours–from Afghan cities hundreds of miles apart as well as from provincial towns that have been fortresses of Taliban power–the statements suggest that tensions building since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States are reaching a breaking point.
With the Taliban leaders refusing to hand over Osama bin Laden, named by the United States as the prime suspect in the attacks, many within the Taliban’s ranks appear to have concluded that war with the United States is inevitable.
Looting of shops and homes has begun. In Kandahar, Taliban fighters have stormed into a United Nations compound and driven off with vehicles used in an American-financed program that has been disarming millions of landmines left over from the guerrilla war against Soviet forces in the 1980s. Shops in the capital, Kabul, as well as Kandahar and the eastern city of Jalalabad have emptied of food.
On the streets of all three cities the widely feared religious police–notorious for beating women for the most trivial offenses against the Taliban’s repressive social codes–are reported to have virtually disappeared.
Intelligence agents have burst into homes and arrested anyone who so much as mentions the name of Mohammed Zahir Shah, the exiled Afghan king who has emerged as a possible figurehead for a post-Taliban government that American diplomats have been promoting, according to some reports.
Religious schools known as madrassas that have indoctrinated zealous young Taliban fighters have been closed, and the students sent off to be inducted into the army. But many have joined the flood of other refugees heading for Pakistan, only to be pulled from their families at gunpoint and pressed into service in the Taliban’s front-line units.
Claims by the Northern Alliance of large numbers of front-line Taliban field commanders being prepared to defect had echoes elsewhere.
In another region crucial to Taliban power, along Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan, Taliban commanders in three key provinces that control the southern approaches to Kabul–Paktika, Paktia and Lowgar–were reported Wednesday to have been in contact with opposition groups that have come together in a loose alliance against the Taliban.
According to officials in Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, tribal chiefs have shown “some interest” in defecting to the new alliance on condition that it be led by the exiled king.
Railing against king
If true, these reports would explain why the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, has concentrated several of his diatribes in recent days against the 86-year-old former king, warning him to live out his life in exile in Rome, where he has resided since 1973.
Anybody who supports the king or any other anti-Taliban movement, Omar said in a radio address Wednesday, “will be accused of treason,” an offense punishable by death.
More Top Picks Best Study Desks For Small Bedrooms
Perhaps the most striking account coming out of Afghanistan–given Wednesday night in a satellite telephone call from an Afghan reporter inside Afghanistan–said that Omar had left Kandahar for an undisclosed location along with other top Taliban officials and military commanders.
The reporter, who has close ties to the Taliban, said the move was seen by Taliban loyalists as emblematic of Omar’s wiliness as an old anti-Soviet guerrilla fighter girding for the new holy war.
“People see it as a sign of his skill,” the reporter said.
Headless forces
But other Afghans greeted the development as a sign that the Taliban, with only rudimentary communications in the cities and virtually no telephones or fax machines outside them, could quickly become leaderless under the pounding of an American attack.
In this view, Omar’s quitting Kandahar was leaving ordinary Afghans to face a fate brought on them by the Taliban.
“They are hated, hated for what they have done to women, hated for the fear they have spread, hated for the hunger they have brought to people, hated for the way they have distorted Islam, hated for making Afghanistan a base for people like bin Laden who have brought so much misery around the world,” one Afghan with relatives still in Kabul said Wednesday when he heard that Omar had left Kandahar.
“So is it any surprise that they are crumbling now?”