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Five years ago this month, the US-led coalition unleashed a wave of air strikes in Afghanistan. The attacks were the first response to September 11th. They were an attempt to destroy al-Qaeda, to hunt down its leader, Osama bin Laden, and to topple the Taliban government.

Five years later, the Taliban is out of power, but the group is resurgent in Afghanistan and in neighboring Pakistan. Al Qaeda remains active in smaller and more widely-dispersed cells and Osama bin Laden remains on the loose. Boston Globe reporter Charles Sennott was among the first journalists on the ground in Afghanistan five years ago. He recently went back.

Charles Sennott: The idea was to go back five years later and see, just how dramatic the changes in Afghanistan were. To really look at that place and study it. And also, to assess the successes, failures, and challenges ahead in what Washington is now calling "The Long War."

Lisa: But as you reported on this, for the Boston Globe in this special partnership now with The World, you started out in Pakistan. Why?

Sennott: We started in Pakistan, because Pakistan is really where Osama bin Laden gets his beginning. In the late 1980s Bin Laden went to Pakistan with a loyal group of Arab fighters to help the Mujahedeen against the Soviet Union. That loyal core eventually became "al Qaeda". The Taliban also had its start in Pakistan in the mid 1990s, and then went across the border and eventually took over Kabul and the government. And, you know, in 2001, after the US air strikes, Osama bin Laden, many believe, may have fled into Pakistan. The Taliban, al Qaeda, remnants of its leadership, also fled into Pakistan, and it's there that they've regrouped and returned to Afghanistan and are now being described as "resurgent" in many of the different regions inside Afghanistan.

Lisa: So we'll start off the story of your journey as you head from Islamabad to Peshawar in Pakistan.

Sennott: The road to Peshawar follows the route of the ancient Silk Road. It takes us into the storied city, the heart of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province. It's a rugged and lawless land on the Afghanistan border, a crossroads of conflict for centuries. These days it's an intersection of Islamic fervency and armed resistance to Western influences and American policies

At Peshawar's oldest mosque, a teenage boy recites the Koran from memory. Generation after generation, young men are drawn into the mosque by a call from God and a call to take up arms against the Christian West. This grand, white alabaster mosque is a place where the young and the old gather for religion ... and politics.

Inside the mosque, a sermon by its chief cleric blares over the loudspeaker. Mulla Mohammed Yousef Qureshi is an influential man in Pakistan. He's an advisor on Islamic law to Pakistan's High Court, and a supporter of President Pervez Musharraf. But Qureshi is also an outspoken supporter of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. Before this sermon, we sat down for an interview and talked about the idea of jihad, a complex theology of struggle to preserve the faith. I asked the mullah how a leading theologian like himself -- from a country America thinks of as an ally -- could accept bin Laden's violent interpretation of Islamic doctrine. He avoided the question. When I pressed him again, he declared the interview over and walked out to deliver this sermon.
I can tell that the mullah is railing against America. At one point the eyes of hundreds of men at prayer turn toward me and glare with disapproval. Later, back at our hotel, my Pakistani colleague translates a tape of the sermon.

TRANSLATOR: He says that, "We are friends of Osama because the Western world is against Muslims and he is standing up to them. We are friends of Osama and the Taliban because they are working on behalf of Islam. Even President Musharraf, they are actually against America but they have to support them because America is a superpower."

It's a message that anyone traveling in Pakistan can hear from teenagers and old men, in crowded slums and rural villages, and especially in the madrassas, or religious schools, where the call to prayer is often a call to jihad as well.
Islamabad

In the capital, Islamabad, I spoke with the headmaster of a large madrassa. He sat cross-legged on a carpet flanked by a Koran and a Kalashnikov. He swelled with a teacher's pride as he spoke of the hundreds of his graduates who he says have gone on to take up the jihad against American troops across the border in Afghanistan.

The rising extremism is deeply troubling to U.S. diplomats here. Military and intelligence reports show that Pakistan has become a refuge for Taliban and al Qaeda fighters.

But the suggestion that Pakistan harbors America's enemies makes government officials here bristle.

Rawalpindi

The road to Rawalpindi takes you across a bridge where President Pervez Musharraf was nearly assassinated. Militants have targeted him several times in recent years. They see his alliance with the U.S. as treason.

Rawalpindi is the seat of Pakistan's vast military and intelligence community, and the official story here is that groups like al Qaeda and the Taliban are not finding safe refuge in Pakistan.
General Shaukat Sultan is a senior adviser to President Musharraf.

General Shaukat Sultan: Those who say that Taliban are present in Pakistan, they would be saying so just sitting somewhere outside or sitting in drawing rooms.

The general is defensive about Pakistan's efforts to root out extremists and crack down on militant religious schools. When asked about the resurgence of the Taliban in the mountains of Afghanistan, he assigns blame across the border.

General Shaukat Sultan: Yes, the Taliban are certainly gaining strength and that is mainly because their stronghold was so far untouched in southern Afghanistan. And for all these four years they had the entire time at their disposal to re-organize themselves.

These last four years roughly coincide with the U.S.-led war in Iraq. And that, General Sultan says, is the main problem with the American effort to destroy the Taliban and Al Qaeda. He says America has become distracted.

General Shaukat Sultan: The opening up of the Iraq front after Afghanistan has certainly led to some shift of focus. And at the same time the war in Iraq has also acted as a magnet for maybe Al Qaeda and maybe the creation of more extremists around the Muslim world.

This sentiment sounds like finger pointing, but it's a view that's shared by observers around the world, from Islamabad to Washington. America, the theory goes, dropped the ball in Afghanistan when it invaded Iraq.

Meanwhile, millions here in Pakistan and across the Muslim world consider the Iraq war, and the wide sweep of Washington's self proclaimed "war on terror", as inherently anti-Muslim. President Bush says that Islamic extremists "hate us for our freedoms," but diplomats and analysts say such speeches misinterpret many Muslims' anger. They say it's not America's freedom that they hate, it's the hypocrisy of American policy. Washington talks about spreading democracy, but supports leaders like Pakistan's Musharraf, a general who first seized power in a military coup. Washington talks about human rights, but the Muslim world watches images of Abu Graib and Guantanamo.

Anger toward the US yields militancy and that militancy is intensifying in the tribal regions along Pakistan's mountainous border with Afghanistan.

In the Border Region

Along the Afghan border in Dir province, tiny tribal villages of mud houses and shops are strung together along what must be some of the world's worst roads. Anti-American sentiment is especially virulent here and support for bin Laden runs deep.

In the remote village of Aladand, I meet a young man named Shah Mohammed. Five years ago, Mohammed was picked up by US forces across the border in Afghanistan and taken to Guantanamo Bay. They suspected he was a member of the Taliban. The story he tells about what happened there has only sharpened the local sense of intense grievance against the United States.

Shah Mohammed: They would tie our hands and feet, eight people together - they were beating us.

Mohammed was 21 when he was arrested. He was working in a bakery run by the Taliban government, but he says he never had anything else to do with them. In Guantanamo, he says, he was routinely tortured. He attempted suicide four times. Eventually, after 18 months, his U.S. interrogators began to research his alibis and found them to be true. He was released, and given a document that says that he's no longer wanted by the US government, but he says there was no apology. The US Department of Defense will not comment on specifics of the case. Sitting in his family's tiny grocery store, Mohammed tries to unpack the details of his confinement. His face grows despondent, and his thoughts fragment.

Shah Mohammed: I was a baker when I was apprehended. I went to Guantanamo, and then I came back to Pakistan. I was a baker, I am a baker, I will be a baker. I don't know other than that.

To Mohammed's family and friends, his treatment at Guantanamo destroyed the mind and the soul of a young man who was once confident and adventurous. His uncle says Mohammed's story is retold from one village to the next in this corner of Pakistan like a fable and he says it's further hardened people's hearts and minds against America.

Shah Mohammed's Uncle: This is not the same Shah Mohammed which was before he was tortured and that is what the whole world sees. They feel angry against America, and they say, "Why did they do all this with an innocent man?" But the hatred that we have developed against America, that is visible by everyone.

Just up the road from Mohammed's village are a mosque and a group of fighters who are allied with the Taliban. They won't talk about their operations on tape, but a local leader tells me that many members of the militia know the story of Shah Mohammed. The injustice done to him has motivated many young recruits to join up. This organization has sent thousands of guerillas into Afghanistan and the leader tells me that there are many more who wish to go into battle against the US.

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