PESHAWAR, Oct 25: Taliban bow to military advice from their professional commanders in warfare, and experienced Arab fighters are manning many front line positions, a senior Kabul commander said on Thursday.
The commander also said he was convinced the Taliban were considering having Osama bin Laden leave Afghanistan before the US-led strikes began.
However, the senior leadership changed its mind when it became convinced Washington would attack no matter what it did, the commander, who asked not to be identified, told Reuters here.
“If we had a Loya Jirga (assembly), we could agree to have Osama leave in three months,” he said.
The commander said that Arab, Pakistani, Chechen and other foreign Muslim forces in Osama’s Al Qaeda network did not interfere with the Taliban much in Kabul, and many were now posted at the front against the opposition Northern Alliance in the Shomali valley north of Kabul.
“The Arabs are very experienced, they fight better than we do,” he said of the men who are believed to have trained in camps in Afghanistan and to be loyal to Osama.
US strikes against Arab and Pakistani forces at the front might decimate those ranks, he said, but this would not weaken the will of the Afghan Taliban forces to resist.
The commander said he had joined the Taliban when they seized power in 1996 because they put an end to the rampant warlordism of the 1992-96 Mujahideen government and planned to bring peace.
The Taliban rulers did not meddle in military affairs, he said, and they had come to depend increasingly on the veteran commanders as the war escalated.
“They listen very carefully now when we have something to say,” he said.
Most troops were not fundamentalists and disagreed with some Taliban views, but stayed with them for economic reasons or because they liked the Northern Alliance even less.
The commander, a 45-year-old Kabul Military Academy graduate who served in the Afghan Army until Afghanistan’s 1978 communist coup, said some Taliban commanders had personal reasons not to want to fight the Northern Alliance.
“Most of them are my friends,” he said, recalling that they fought together against the Soviet forces in the 1980s.
“When we’re at the front, we ask ourselves: Am I shooting my friends? We don’t know,” said the commander who said his 500-man regiment saw its headquarters in eastern Kabul hit by US bombs late last week. The troops had already deserted the buildings, knowing they were a target, so none were killed, he said.
SATELLITE DISHES: The commander indicated that he had more in common perhaps with his enemies than with his leaders.
“The Taliban and the military are quite different,” he explained. “We were educated in schools and colleges while they only had training in Madaris.”
“They don’t take photos, but we do,” the commander said.
“They don’t watch television, either. They banned satellite dishes, but we have one at the regiment that we keep hidden, so we have been watching the war on BBC and CNN television,” he said.
Discussing the Taliban’s ban on women education, the commander said the education minister had explained to him the government could not afford to run girls schools now but would open some if peace came.
He had four daughters and two sons, all being educated in good schools in Peshawar where they lived with their mother, the commander added.
When asked whether this clashed with the Taliban thinking, he laughed.
“There are ministers and senior officials in the Taliban government who have their families living in Peshawar and send their daughters to school,” he said.—Reuters
