Many Taliban Officials Face a Postwar Limbo

CHAMAN, Pakistan —  The bombing was terrible. In the Afghan border town of Spin Buldak, just opposite Chaman, the ground shook and the blasts of American bombs landing just outside the town shattered the air. It lasted four hours, until nearly 2 a.m.

At the Taliban safe house in Spin Buldak, less than five miles from the bombing, no one slept Wednesday night.

“We were terrified. The blasts were too much,” said Najibullah Akhund Shirzai, the Taliban’s 33-year-old liaison and security officer in Spin Buldak. As the bombs fell, Akhund said, his group began to get used to them.

But Akhund was still visibly shaken Thursday morning, and more than a little fatigued. For weeks, he has slept in different houses--often crossing back and forth across the Pakistani border--to find a place safe from middle-of-the-night bombing raids.

He has wanted to leave Spin Buldak, but the Taliban wouldn’t let him, vowing to die defending the run-down little border town.

Now, with the Taliban’s surrender of Spin Buldak, Akhund is one of hundreds of Taliban officials whose future hangs in the balance.

He wants to flee to his native village in Wardak province southwest of Kabul and join his wife and children, but he fears that the villagers would drive him off--or worse--because of the years he has worn the black turban of the Taliban.

Those who worked in the Taliban government face the potential wrath of fellow Afghans, despite the possibility of amnesty in the tentative surrender agreement. Even people like Akhund, who was a politician, not a fighter, worry that villagers back home may harbor a grudge.

“My dream is the whole of Afghanistan coming under a peaceful atmosphere, and I am peaceful. This is my last hope: security and peace,” Akhund, in the reception room of a relative’s home across the border in Pakistan, said wistfully.

Sitting on a plush red pillow, Akhund shared few of his anxieties.

To visitors, Akhund insists he is ready to fight to the death to defend Spin Buldak, as the Taliban leadership was calling for before the surrender talks began to gain momentum.

Wearing the intimidating black turban of the Taliban, Akhund is somewhat convincing.

“We will carry out the program of our scholars, who told us we should be staying, and what our leaders say, we do,” Akhund said solemnly. “Maybe we will be captured. According to our leaders’ honor, we must sacrifice. . . . This is our duty: that we should stay in caves or holes, or we should die.”

What Akhund doesn’t say, but his uncle does, is that he doesn’t want to die at all. Until the talk of surrender and amnesty Thursday, he simply couldn’t figure out an alternative.

“He doesn’t want to be anymore with the Taliban, but when he talked about leaving, the people of Taliban said, ‘You must stay in Spin Buldak.’ He [was] nearly under house arrest,” said Mohammed Naeem.

Ultimately, Naeem believes, his nephew, like most of the Afghan Taliban members, will melt back into the land from which he came. He dismisses Akhund’s worry about reaction from anti-Taliban townspeople if his nephew goes home to see his wife and three young daughters.

Afghanistan’s warring factions have simply lived through too much together in 23 years of civil war to be unable to forgive the Taliban, he said.

“Gul Agha’s people are working here,” said Naeem, referring to Gul Agha Shirzai, the warring tribal leader whose troops are facing off against the Taliban near Kandahar, the militant Islamic regime’s spiritual center and last stronghold. “Taliban people are working here. There is no enmity between them. Fighting is fighting, and it can be left behind.”

Akhund is not convinced.

“I am thinking about myself,” he said. “I’m not sure I should stay in my house in Wardak. Is the situation in my favor, or not? We will see the conditions and the situation. Maybe I can go to Pakistan . . . . “

Akhund became a familiar Taliban figure when he directed security for dozens of foreign journalists who stayed in Spin Buldak until the Taliban could no longer guarantee their safety.

Not long after that, he proved just how completely a Taliban can disappear into the landscape. He drove out of Afghanistan into Quetta, Pakistan, visiting relatives for four days before heading back to Spin Buldak, and the apparent anger of Taliban officials.

Since then, Akhund has crossed the international border almost daily, in apparent defiance of Pakistan’s border closure to prevent the escape of Taliban members and Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda fighters. The Taliban leadership sanctioned brief forays outside the city because Akhund’s work requires him to protect the interests of Afghan residents crossing into Pakistan as refugees.

But they have made it clear that he must come back. Akhund, trying to appear cheerful, shrugged. He will discuss none of it.

“What can I do to help you?” Naeem asked as they sat in the reception room, Akhund preparing to head back into Afghanistan.

“You can’t help me,” Akhund said, smiling, as if to make it a joke.

As he prepared to leave, he paused by the gate and squinted into the fading afternoon sun. Naeem stood in the shadows, watching him.

“Look at him,” he whispered. “He is looking like a hopeless man. Hopeless man.”

Then he smiled broadly again and rushed up to shake his nephew’s hand. They said goodbye, and the young man slipped through the gate.