CHAMAN, 7 October 2003 — An old white mosque straddles the dusty border between southern Pakistan and Afghanistan, less than two kilometers from here. Worshipers can enter from the Afghan side and step out into Pakistan, unchecked. This sacred slipway is just one example of the porousness of the 1,200 kilometer (744 mile) frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan’s vast southwest province Balochistan — a frontier which Afghan officials say is criss-crossed at will by resurgent Taleban forces and their Al-Qaeda allies waging a bloody guerrilla campaign inside Afghanistan.
Afghan leaders charge the militants are finding support among Pashtun tribes in Balochistan border areas and the tribal belt further north, allowing them to regroup and stage hit-and-run attacks in Afghanistan.
In tribal-dominated Balochistan, it is hard to tell who is a Taleban fighter and who is a simple merchant conducting cross-border trade, as tribesmen’s ancestors have done for centuries.
“After 9/11 Taleban trimmed their beards, changed their turbans and stopped carrying arms,” said a senior security official based in the provincial capital Quetta, 100 kilometers (62 miles) southwest of here.
“Now it is nearly impossible to pinpoint who is Afghan Taleban and who is a Pakistani Pashtun tribesman.”
Border guards struggle to check documents in a two-way sea of pedestrian and vehicular traffic surging through an official crossing. “They don’t have tails that we can identify them by. We do not have the capacity to check every Pashtun and interrogate him,” the official said, citing additional fears of alienating locals. The border district of Chaman faces Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar province, where the Taleban movement first took hold in 1994 after sprouting from Islamic seminaries in Balochistan.
They are the kind of seminaries Afghan President Hamid Karzai is campaigning to have shut down. Karzai says too many of them breed fundamentalism and produce recruits ripe for the neo-Taleban forces.
“Some months ago some Afghan Taleban were taking students from seminaries to prepare them to fight in Afghanistan,” a Quetta-based intelligence official told AFP.
“Long Live Mulla Omar Mujahid (warrior),” declares a sign above the entrance to the Darul Aloom Islamia seminary in Quetta, using the affectionate local term for the Taleban’s elusive one-eyed leader.
“Mulla Omar Mujahid and Osama Bin Laden are chased by the Americans because they are true Muslims,” its principal, firebrand cleric Maulvi Jan Mohammad told AFP. “They are not terrorists. They are pious Muslims.” Afghan diplomats in Quetta allege that students from schools like Mohammad’s are taking part in the cross-border guerrilla raids. “We have information that Taleban studying in Islamic seminaries in Quetta and Chaman are involved in these attacks,” deputy consul general Abdul Haleem Daqiq told AFP.
