mechanical defects or because of intelligence failures. One example
was the village of Madoo in eastern Afghanistan (Bearak, 2001).
On the ground things did not initially proceed so smoothly. Even
before 7 October, there was evidence of panic in Kandahar
(Moore, 2001), and once attacks began, refugees began to flee in
their thousands (Neilan, 2001). A commando operation in the
Kandahar area on the night of 19 October ran into difficulties
when it encountered ground fire, fuelling suspicions that the
Taliban may have been forewarned by ISI sympathisers of what
was about the happen. Even more serious was the capture and
murder by the Taliban on 26 October of the prominent moderate
Pushtun Abdul Haq, a highly respected figure whom many had
hoped would be able to rally Pushtun support against Mulla Omar.
Abdul Haq, whose wife and young son had been murdered in
Peshawar some years previously, had been living in Dubai, but had
returned to Afghanistan with the support of several private
American activists. Again, the suspicion remains that he was
betrayed by Taliban supporters in ISI. Finally, the sense began to
develop amongst the United Front forces that the USA was reticent
in striking Taliban frontlines through which they could then have
driven (Rohde, 2001a), possibly because of Islamabad’s obvious
fear that the United Front would recover a dominant position, leav-
ing Pakistan’s Afghanistan strategy in ruins.
Nor did things proceed altogether smoothly in the political realm.
Pakistan remained a problem. On 25 September, Foreign Minister
Abdul Sattar warned that any move by foreign powers ‘to give
assistance to one side or the other in Afghanistan is a recipe for
great suffering for the people of Afghanistan’ (Apple, 2001). The
United Front found this breathtaking in its hypocrisy, given that this
was exactly what Pakistan had been doing for years. A more serious
political glitch arose when Secretary of State Powell, during a visit
to Islamabad, appeared at a press conference with Musharraf and
seemed to suggest that moderates within the Taliban could be per-
suaded to join a future Afghan government (Constable, 2001). The
statement was at best somewhat innocent, as the Taliban movement
constituted only a tiny fragment of the Pushtun ethnic group
264 The Afghanistan Wars