New cells are in place in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates and they will be responsible for carrying out attacks—including suicide attacks—against U. S. interests in a number of regions. This will be the new face of Al-Qaeda, which will emerge soon with a new name and command. The Riyadh episode seems to be their first step.

The U. S. State Department has confirmed that the unified command and its Taliban backers will re-emerge in Afghanistan.

Every Al-Qaeda operations officer captured to date had been involved in some stage of preparation for a terrorist attack at the time of arrest. Last week, Pakistan announced the arrest of Khalid bin al-Atash in Karachi, along with some Afghanis and one Pakistani. Intelligence sources confirmed that Khalid was in fact arrested near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in Baluchistan. Khalid was said to be in the process to carry out an attack on Jacobad’s Shehbaz airbase, which is used by the U. S. Air Force.

Khalid was arrested by members of the U. S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Pakistani law enforcers along with a few of his Afghani guards and a Pakistani Baloch, who was to be involved in the attack on the airport. Khalid has been connected to the Sheraton hotel bomb blast in Karachi last year. He had narrowly escaped arrest on several occasions.He recently entered Afghanistan and made some border towns near Pakistan his base. However, U. S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pointed out that an end to military operations in Afghanistan was in sight. In the past few months, a number of people like Khalid have entered Afghanistan, with the desire to strike against American targets. The emphasis will be on small operations with a nexus of local groups, and its main tool will be suicide attacks.

Increasing reports are emerging from Afghanistan of battles between anti-foreign forces and Afghan militias and U. S. troops. The main characteristic of the guerrilla attacks has been what appears to be, for the first time, a consolidated strategy. This is exactly the same strategy that the Taliban adopted in 1994. Coincidentally, before they completely took over Kandahar in 1994, Zabul, Shakin and Argon were their main playing fields.Trade between Afghan and Pakistan tribes knows no borders.At the same time, the transport mafias make a mint, so they take exception to U. S. troops attempting to block them. They want the troops to go, so they are happy to lend their support to the anti-U. S. commanders along the Afghan border.

Meanwhile, with the fall of Baghdad, Iran has become sandwiched between a U. S.-dominated Iraq to the west and Afghanistan to the east.

The governor of Herat, Ismail Khan, is said to be playing a pivotal role in the anti-U. S. movement, notably by refusing U. S. demands to disarm warlords in his area. Khan was one of the more prominent commanders during the anti-Soviet resistance movement of the 1980s. The revolt he engineered proved to be a turning point in the anti-Soviet movement in Afghanistan.

When they fled the country in the face of the U. S.-led troops in early 2002, the Taliban peacefully handed over the reins of power to Ismail Khan in Herat.

Former Afghan premier and guerrilla leader Gulbuddin Hikmatyar has organised his commanders around Jalalabad and Kunhar in the east, although he is very much in touch with his loyals in northern Afghanistan. Mir Arif, the governor of Kunduz, is one of these. And even though he is an ethnic Uzbek, because he is associated with Hikmatyar’s Pashtun-orientated Hezb-i-Islami, several Pashtun warlords support Mir Arif.

This situation gave the U. S. A. a chance to point a finger at the ISI for its involvement in Afghanistan, and President Musharraf was quick to put a stop to such behaviour by establishing a strategic division at General Headquarters Rawalpindi. But already a large amount of ammunition and money had been moved to the Hezb-i-Islami commanders.

After the rapid retreat of the Taliban, many Arab, Chechen and Uzbek fighters took refuge in Pakistan. But with the recent guerrilla attacks in southeastern Afghanistan virtually making administration impossible, many of these foreign fighters have returned.

Beating the summer 250 years ago