Taliban terrorizing its way back to the top

KABUL, Afghanistan — At a gas station on the outskirts of Kabul, lounging in the shade of a transport truck, Mohammed Raza describes how he escaped death.

Last month, a U.S. contractor promised him $10,000 if he'd drive a truck full of diesel from Kabul to Kandahar, offering seven times more than he could earn by transporting his usual shipments of sugar. But the Taliban forbid drivers from carrying fuel to the foreign troops, he said, and the insurgents run checkpoints on the road between Afghanistan's two largest cities. He rejected the offer. One of his friends took the assignment, he said, and the Taliban cut off his head.

"Many drivers now are selling their lives," the 25-year-old said, nervously twisting the fringe of his beard.

The Taliban are isolating Afghanistan's capital city from the rest of the country, choking off important supply routes and imposing their rules on the provinces near Kabul. Interviews suggest that the Taliban have gained control along three of the four major highways into the city, and some believe it's a matter of time before they regulate all traffic around the capital.

That marks a shocking reversal of the insurgents' fortunes. Taliban were fleeing along the highways out of Kabul less than seven years ago, abandoning their government offices, dying under a hail of U.S. air strikes as they scrambled to flee. Now the Taliban and their allied militias are creeping back up the same roads, quietly showing their presence on the outskirts of the city.

Kabul itself is heavily guarded, and nobody expects a frontal assault.

But the insurgents don't need to attack the capital. By hobbling the government's ability to reach its own citizens beyond the city gates, security analysts say, the Taliban make the rulers of Kabul irrelevant in broad swaths of the country. It's more than a propaganda victory; the insurgents are grabbing the same political high ground the Taliban exploited during their previous sweep to power in the 1990s, by positioning themselves as the best enforcers of security in rural Afghanistan.

The roadblocks have also started to pinch the foreign troops. Military bases find themselves running short of fuel and other supplies.

Commercial aircraft were repeatedly warned this summer that they would not be able to purchase fuel at Kandahar Air Field, and the airfield shut down some facilities to reduce electricity needs during the peak fighting season. The insurgents have also targeted aid shipments, stealing about 0.5 percent from World Food Program truck convoys in the first half of the year, enough to feed 80,000 people for a month during a food crisis in which the WFP says it's facing a vast shortfall in supplies.