Divided loyalties

By Laura King

Associated Press

QUETTA, Pakistan – Haroon Rehimzai, a lanky 20-year-old artist whose family fled Afghanistan when he was a child, has positive things to say about the Taliban, his homeland’s hard-line rulers.

They have brought stability and order to most of Afghanistan, putting an end to the bloody and chaotic infighting he dimly remembers from childhood, he says. And he staunchly supports their refusal to give up accused terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, as the United States demands. “America has supplied no proof,” he insists.

But ask Rehimzai whether he himself would like to live under Taliban rule – a rigorously purist brand of Islam that punishes men for offenses such as failing to pray five times daily and wear a beard, keeps women unschooled and out of sight, stones adulterers and blasphemers, and bans entertainment such as television – and he blinks and sits up straight.

“Oh, no,” he says. His family has found a better life in Pakistan, and he cannot imagine living in Afghanistan ever again.

Such strongly held but contradictory sentiments are common in Baluchistan, a border province where attachments to Afghanistan in general, and the Taliban in particular, are perhaps deeper and more complex than anywhere else in Pakistan, America’s key ally in the confrontation over bin Laden.

Historically, this southwest province shares culture and custom, language and tribal kinship with those living in and around the Afghan city of Kandahar, the Taliban’s home base, which was once the capital of a realm encompassing much of Baluchistan.

These long-standing cross-border loyalties could assume new importance if the sprawling, strategically located province, with its sealed-off military bases and desert airfields, emerges as a staging ground for American strikes on bin Laden’s Afghan bases – and the Taliban itself.

In Baluchistan’s provincial capital of Quetta – a once-charming but now dusty and overcrowded city of 1.2 million people – at least one-third of the population is made up of Afghan exiles and refugees. Of the rest, the great majority are Pashtun, the predominant ethnic group in Afghanistan.

Among them, one can find a gamut of opinion: from hero worship of bin Laden, to condemnation of his suspected role in the terror attacks against America, from fervent vows of fealty to the Taliban, to quiet hopes that this crisis will prove to be the hard-line Afghan government’s undoing.

“Do you want to go against Afghanistan?” a leading mullah, or cleric, Molana Anwar ul-Haq Haqami, shouted from mosque loudspeakers during an anti-American, pro-bin Laden protest in the center of Quetta on Friday.

“No!” a crowd of several thousand roared in response. Protesters burned an effigy of President Bush, tearing it apart and stamping on the pieces, and waved posters of bin Laden labeled “No. 1 Hero.”

Many students at Quetta’s madrassas, or religious seminaries, are crossing the border into Afghanistan to offer their services to the Taliban army, or saying they will do so at the first sign of hostilities.

“This is the beginning of history – there will be no mercy for America,” said an intense-eyed 18-year-old student who would identify himself only as Najibullah.

At the other end of the spectrum is Amir Uddin, vice chairman of the provincial branch of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, who considers the Taliban’s members as dangerous extremists who have enslaved Afghanistan, and supports Pakistan’s alliance with the United States in the escalating crisis.

“The Taliban are fanatics and terrorists – I favor U.S. action, and U.S. attacks against them,” he said. But he acknowledges that military action against Afghanistan would likely spark a backlash here – “Nobody likes America,” he said.

Rehimzai, the young Afghan-born artist, says the traditional Pashtun code of protecting those who have been granted hospitality makes it impossible for the Taliban to hand over bin Laden.

“That is not our way,” he said. “Our guests are entitled to our protection.”

That assertion was scoffed at by Haji Akbar, a 45-year-old ethnic Pashtun physician who has spent years in Afghanistan. “Our culture does not include sheltering criminals,” he snapped.