War on Terrorism Stirs Anger of Pakistani Tribe

Hidden from the outside world, an escalating war against terrorism in the wild badlands of northwestern Pakistan is feeding a seething anger, and many here are talking of new scores to settle with the United States.

The hunt for suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters in the Pushtun tribal areas bordering Afghanistan has turned violent several times during the last few months. Recently, Pakistani police blew up five ethnic Pushtun villagers’ homes as punishment for refusing to cooperate with the U.S.-declared war against terrorism.

Several thousand Pakistani soldiers and paramilitary police, said to be working with U.S. military advisors, are mounting search-and-destroy operations in rugged areas where Pushtun tribesmen bitterly resent outside interference.

Any mistakes made now risk creating a new generation of anti-American hatred in a region that has long been a breeding ground for terrorism against the West and India, Pakistan’s neighbor.

“We welcomed the Pakistan army, but now, when people suspect American advisors are with them, feelings are turned against them,” said Maulana Mir Kalam, 50, a Pushtun religious leader from the village of Datta Khel, on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.

“We think that all of Pakistan is our home, and we cannot tolerate having American troops searching our homes and areas.”

The Pakistani government says it has arrested 422 Al Qaeda members crossing from Afghanistan so far, but scores more are believed to have eluded capture. Former Taliban government ministers and other officials have been seen residing, and making speeches, in Pakistan’s refugee camps. A militant underground is still thriving.

A former Taliban diplomat summoned four Pakistani journalists Sept. 27 to a secret location in Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier Province, and said he had recently met with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar in Afghanistan.

Naseer Ahmed Roohi, who was first secretary at the Taliban’s embassy in the United Arab Emirates, said he saw Omar in Afghanistan more than two weeks earlier to receive instructions from him. Roohi also claimed that 5,000 Taliban members and supporters were waging a guerrilla war against U.S. forces and their Afghan allies.

The Pushtuns here have resisted central authority, and outside intervention, for centuries, and many see the U.S. as the latest in a long line of foreign powers that have tried, and failed, to conquer them.

They live by a centuries-old code of honor called pushtunwali. It allows a Pushtun only one way to restore his honor and self-respect in the face of an insult or injury: He must exact revenge. And if death comes first, his surviving relatives are bound to seek vengeance for him.

The first U.S. soldier killed by enemy fire in Afghanistan, Sgt. 1st Class Nathan Ross Chapman, was shot in January by a 14-year-old boy as payback for the death of his father in a bombing raid, Pushtun elders in the eastern city of Khowst said at the time.

Just across the border in Pakistan’s tribal areas, U.S. troops are providing what is officially called “technical assistance” to Pakistani forces. Both governments refuse to say how many U.S. soldiers, or civilian agents, are operating in northwestern Pakistan or what they are doing here.

A Pakistani intelligence official said several FBI agents work out of the U.S. Consulate in Peshawar and go into the tribal regions only on special missions.

But the common belief among Pushtuns is that Americans are directing Pakistani forces to attack their own countrymen. Right or wrong, that view is strengthening support for the Taliban and Al Qaeda in a region the U.S. military sees as a rear base for the radical Islamic fighters.

Islamic radicals in madrasas, or religious schools, are resisting Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s reform efforts, and some have become rallying points for extremists as they regroup. Angry rhetoric against the war on terrorism is escalating in the madrasas, including the one where American John Walker Lindh studied the Koran for six months before joining the Taliban in 2001.

“This is not a war, this is a cancer--for the entire world,” said Mufti Mohammed Iltamas, 33, a staunch Taliban supporter who taught Lindh here in this village.

At least three U.S. soldiers in uniform are advising Pakistani forces from a base in a former vocational school compound in the town of Miran Shah, in the North Waziristan tribal region, according to local journalist Al-Haj Mohammed Paxir Gul, correspondent for Dawn, one of Pakistan’s leading English-language dailies.

The U.S. soldiers decide where to look for suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters, and then Pakistani troops carry out the searches, or deal with any resistance, Gul said.

Gul, who lives in Miran Shah, claimed that three Americans acted as advisors in a two-hour search operation at Dhanday Darpakhel, near the Miran Shah bazaar. The operation turned up nothing, and only one shot was fired, accidentally, by a Pakistani soldier, according to Gul.

A local official in the tribal agency that administers the area confirmed that a few Americans are still based at the vocational school. But they are working in civilian clothes and spend most of their time in the heavily guarded compound acting as “technical experts,” said the official, who spoke on condition that he not be named because of the secrecy of the mission.

Asked about the U.S. operations in Pakistan, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command said: “I do not have a word of anything on that for you. Nothing at all on that issue.”

One of the most recent clashes between Pakistani security forces and Pushtun tribesmen occurred in the village of Jani Khel early last month after the troops arrested six suspected Al Qaeda fighters and a mob of as many as 60 armed villagers grabbed them back.

Some reports said authorities believe that the men arrested Sept. 2 were Chechens or Indonesians. But Kalam, a member of North Waziristan’s tribal jirga, or traditional council, insisted that they were local men who had no links to terrorism.

Local elders later returned to a checkpoint with six men, but not the ones the security forces said they had originally arrested, according to Kalam. Hundreds of troops laid siege to the village, and the tribesmen threatened an uprising.

To end the standoff, the tribal region’s administration invoked the draconian Frontier Crimes Regulation, which British colonial rulers imposed in 1901 when Pakistan was still part of India and ruled by the British raj. It permits collective punishment and imprisonment without trial.

When the security forces could finally search the village, the suspects were gone. Authorities ordered the demolition of five houses that were home to about 50 people in the impoverished village of about 300 families.

Kalam said the local jirga reluctantly approved the destruction of the houses, not because council members agreed that the owners were guilty of harboring terrorists but simply to make peace with the government.

The families whose houses were destroyed will eventually rebuild them, the maulana said, but no Pushtun or Muslim can forget the cruelty they have suffered, Kalam said.

Complicating the search operations is a suspicion, expressed privately by some U.S. diplomats and more openly by Afghan officials, that elements of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, may be secretly aiding Taliban and Al Qaeda holdouts.

During a visit to Iltamas’ madrasa, it was obvious that the ISI is still on good terms with some well-known Taliban supporters. A reporter inquired about the mufti’s interrogation in May by four FBI agents interested in Lindh’s stay at the school, and Iltamas immediately got up and made a whispered phone call. Minutes later, two men walked into the room, sat down on the floor and carefully monitored the rest of the interview. At all times, the mufti deferred to the men, who spoke to him like helpful advisors rather than adversaries. They later identified themselves as ISI agents.

The Afghan Interior Ministry, intelligence and military officials have repeatedly accused the ISI of secretly continuing its support for the Taliban to wage a guerrilla war in Afghanistan.

.

“They do it through their Afghan mercenaries,” charged Afghan army Brig. Gen. Mohammed Eisa Shahzadah, an ethnic Pushtun who controls troops in the region east of Kabul, the capital, toward the Pakistan border. “This is Pakistan foreign policy that only the ISI knows about. Of course, it is unofficial and hidden.”

Zahidur Rehman, who recruits guerrilla fighters for the jihad against Indian security forces in the disputed territory of Kashmir, said it is possible that elements of the Pakistani military are aiding the Taliban against orders.

“In name, the [Pakistani] army commanders are Muslims but not practicing ones,” Rehman said in the village of Mitha Khel, also in North-West Frontier Province. “The soldiers up to the rank of major are real Muslims, particularly Pushtuns. They have sympathy for the Taliban and Al Qaeda.”

The majority of Pakistan’s Pushtuns share that feeling and oppose U.S. actions in Afghanistan, he said.

“The Koran teaches that whenever someone comes and attacks your house, which can be taken as your nation or all of Islam, it is your duty to defend yourself, to take up arms against the invaders,” Rehman said.

“America, which considers itself a peaceful country, works to establish its hegemony over the entire world,” Kalam said. “But being Muslims, our prophet has taught us that such people--these infidels--are also human beings.

“We believe in the hereafter, and that these infidels must not go to hell. So we invite them to convert to Islam so that they might be spared eternal damnation. We just want all of humanity to embrace Islam so that they may live happily in the afterlife.”

*

Times staff writer Esther Schrader in Washington and special correspondent Najibullah Murshed in Kabul contributed to this report.