The U.S.'s declared ally, Pakistan, is playing a double role that has made it a sanctuary where jihadist guerrillas can recruit and train fighters, raise money and infiltrate Afghanistan. Since 2001, Pakistan has arrested many al-Qaida leaders and has fitfully confronted home-grown jihadists. Still, it tolerates a broad support network for Taliban and other guerrillas that includes active-duty members of Pakistan's security forces.
So far, Karzai's government and the United States have been fortunate in northeastern Afghanistan. Local tribes, notably in Nuristan province, are historic rivals of the ethnic Pashtuns who dominate the Taliban movement, and they tend to resist the Taliban's calls for jihad.
But, said the Afghan government engineer Wahdat and others, that natural advantage is being squandered because the government and its foreign backers have failed to establish schools, clinics, police forces and other services to meet even basic needs of people scattered in Nuristan's roughly 300 mountain villages. The resulting vacuum, and the depth of people's need, let's Islamic extremists keep deepening their roots here.
Breeding insurgency
While the government operates almost no schools in Nuristan, the Saudi-based World Muslim League and other Arab religious foundations pay salaries for hundreds of mullahs, missionaries and madrassa teachers, said Abdulhai Warshan, a Nuristani journalist for the Afghan service of Voice of America radio. This Islamist network has been rooting itself in every district of Nuristan since the 1980s, when Arabs (and the U.S. government) helped fund the Afghan guerrilla war against the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
With Nuristanis increasingly eager to educate their children, and no government schools in sight, "the Arab madrassas [religious schools] have offered free religious teaching" according to the Saudis' fundamentalist Wahhabi doctrine, Warshan said. For a quarter-century, "it has been the only way ordinary people could educate their sons, and now Wahhabism and extremism have penetrated our area."
