CHAMAN: Unfamiliar with the lie of the land, the first-time visitor to Chaman, which literally means a garden in Urdu, is puzzled by the city’s narrow, dusty lanes, howling winds and, above all, bleak and desolate landscape, with no sight of verdure for miles. The border city, which resembles the neighbouring desert in Afghanistan, stands at odd variance with the rest of Balochistan at least in one respect: its citizens wear their religion on their sleeves.
Wearing bulky turbans and clutching at well-thumbed religious textbooks, children and youths are seen walking to seminaries which grab the headlines every time Afghanistan’s President, Hamid Karzai, and his equally censorious foreign minister, Dr Rangin Dadfar Spanta, accuse them of dispatching armed Taliban into restive southern provinces following daredevil acts of sabotage and militancy that their government, despite the presence of British troops, is powerless to foil.
According to border security forces, when the Taliban are arrested crossing over into Afghanistan they insist that they are actually students returning to their homeland after acquiring only religious education — and no military training — in one of the many seminaries in Chaman. “We have learnt to take such innocuous pleas with a pinch of salt,” they say.
But former provincial legislator, Naseer Ahmad Bacha, who recently obtained a graduate degree to contest the 2007 elections, maintains that a distinction should be made between foreign students returning to Afghanistan and armed fighters sneaking into southern provinces like Kandahar and Helmand with a view to taking part in anti-state guerrilla activities.
“Pathan-Afghan children can use nail-clippers and Kalashnikovs with equal ease. They come to Pakistan to acquire a religious education. The problem is that the security forces manning the border think that if a Pathan boy can read the Quran and sports a beard, he must necessarily be one of the Taliban. This line of reasoning is wrong,” he argues.
But locals in the border city think otherwise. They put down a sharp rise in the stealth strikes carried out by the Taliban in the heart of Kandahar and Helmand to increased assistance from Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.
“The recent upsurge of militancy in the south of Afghanistan comes in the wake of US President George Bush’s visit to the subcontinent. Mosques and seminaries here were used to propagate the notion that it is India that remains in the good books of the Americans in spite of the fact that Pakistan is doing all the dirty work in the US war on terror. They have also underlined the need for countering growing Indian influence in the neighbouring Afghan cities.”
The locals say that Afghan Taliban in need of medical care are often brought to Chaman where they shed their combat fatigues and take up residence at one of the city’s many seminaries. Mulla Gul Mohammad Jangwi is one such Taliban who sustained injuries in a clash with security forces in Spin Boldak and trekked to Chaman to convalesce at a seminary.
“The Taliban are busy fighting in Helmand, Kandahar, Zabul, Uruzgan and other areas of Afghanistan. There are over 46,000 Taliban fighters in each big province while each small province receives a detachment of around 20,000 fighters,” says 33-year-old Janwgi, whose combat career began in 1995. His zeal may mean an exaggerated figure of the Taliban fighters as other sources put it at much lower. Luxuriantly bearded, Jangwi takes a dim view of the manner in which the Taliban’s military accomplishments are handled by the media. But Jangwi is not the only one with complaints against the media. By all accounts, Balochistan’s home minister, Shoaib Nausherwani, is also unhappy with newsmen who, according to him, have put needless spotlight on activities of the Taliban in bordering cities “at the expense of the national interest”. It’s about time he checked with the federal intelligence agencies in Chaman.
