Large numbers of Taliban are living in Quetta and adjacent areas of the city, according to a report in the Christian Science Monitor on Tuesday. The newspaper’s correspondent, David Montero, who talked to one member of the Taliban by the name of Imdadullah, quoted him as claiming, “We are fighting. We have a lot of ammunition in Afghanistan. When the Taliban fell, we kept a lot of ammunition in the mountains.” The reporter noted that Quetta, only 60 miles from the Afghan border, “is the base of operations for the Taliban. Insurgents, they say, cross into Afghanistan for deadly attacks, then recuperate and plan back in Pakistan - where they are safe from allied troops and feel little pressure from Pakistani forces.”The newspaper report said Pakistani officials admit the presence in their country of some Afghan Taliban, but “testily deny” that Pakistan has become a Taliban base. Such allegations, they suggest, cannot be corroborated for the same reason that Pakistan has not been cracking down more: There is no simple way to identify who is and who is not a Taliban fighter. “(Taliban fighters) may be coming. I’m not disputing that,” according to Chaudhry Muhammad Yaqoob, inspector general of police. “The border is porous. People keep moving in and out,” he said. But he denied that any Pakistanis were going to Afghanistan to fight. He and other local police stressed that they cannot arrest everyone in Quetta who wears a turban, which is traditionally associated with the Taliban. There are 400,000 Afghans living in the area and almost all the men wear the traditional headdress, along with many Pakistanis.
The report recalled that when the police arrested 29 wounded Afghan men from Al-Khair, a private hospital in Quetta, it claimed that 10 of them had been fighting NATO forces in Afghanistan, and hailed the arrests as a symbol of their crackdown on Taliban fighters. But hospital officials at Al-Khair said they had no reason to believe the men were fighters. “We haven’t seen anything that will give us the sense that these are Taliban. They are simple Afghans. All have long beards and turbans,” one person said. Paul Fruh, ICRC head in Quetta, added that innocent civilians are wounded in southern Afghanistan every day - and that many of the men are afraid to seek medical help because they are often falsely accused of being Taliban.