Free The Kill List by Frederick Forsyth Page B

congratulate themselves that one hundred, or two or three hundred, Taliban fighters have been taken out, more just seem to appear.
    Some come from the Afghan peasantry, as they always have. Some among these volunteer because relatives—and, in that society, an extended family may number three hundred—have been killed by a misdirected missile, a wrong-target fighter strike or careless artillery; others because they are ordered to fight by their tribal elders. But they are young men, little more than boys.
    Also young are the students from Pakistan, arriving in droves from the religious
madrassah
schools, where for years they study nothing but the Koran and listen to the extremist imams until they are groomed to fight and die.
    But the Taliban army is like no other. Its units are extremely local to the area that bred them. And the reverence to the veteran commanders is total. Take out the veterans, reconvert the clan chiefs, bring in the tribal heads, and an entire county-sized area can simply abandon the fighting.
    For years, British and American Special Forces have been disguising as mountain men, slipping through the hills to assassinate the middle- and upper-ranking Talib leaders, reckoning that the small fry are not really the problem.
    Parallel with the night hunters is the Reintegration Program that seeks to “turn” veterans, to take the olive branch held out by the Kabul government. That day in the hamlet of Qala-e-Zal, General Hook and his Australian assistant, Captain Chris Hawkins, were representing the Force Reintegration Cell. The four wizened Talib chiefs, crouching along the wall, had been coaxed out of the mountains to return to village life.
    As with all fishing, there has to be bait. A “reintegrater” has to attend a course in de-indoctrination. In exchange, there is a free house, a flock of sheep to enable a resumption of farming, an amnesty and the Afghani equivalent of a hundred dollars a week. The purpose of the meeting that bright but crisp May day was to attempt to persuade the veterans that the religious propaganda they had all received for years was, in fact, false.
    As Pashto speakers they could not read the Koran and, like all non-Arab terrorists, had been converted because of what they had been told by Jihadi instructors, many pretending to be imams or mullahs while being nothing of the sort. So a Pashtun mullah or
maulvi
was in attendance to explain to the veterans how they had been deceived; how the Koran was, in reality, a book of peace with only a few “kill” passages, which the terrorists deliberately used out of context.
    And there was a television set in the corner, an object of fascination to the mountain men. It was not screening live TV but a DVD from a player linked to it. The speaker on the screen was using English, but the mullah had a pause button, enabling him to halt the flow, explain what the preacher had said and then reveal how, according to the Holy Koran, it was all rubbish.
    One of the four squatting on the floor was Mahmud Gul, who had been a senior commander as far back as 9/11. He was not yet fifty, but thirteen years in the mountains had aged him; the face beneath the black turban was wrinkled like a walnut, the hands gnarled and aching from incipient arthritis.
    He had been indoctrinated as a young man not against the British and Americans, who he knew had helped free his people from the Russians. He knew little of bin Laden and his Arabs, and what he did know he did not like. He had heard of what had happened in downtown Manhattan all those years ago and he did not approve of it. He had joined the Taliban to fight against the Tajiks and Uzbeks of the Northern Alliance.
    But the Americans did not understand the law of
pashtunwali
, the sacred rule between host and guest that absolutely forbade Mullah Omar to hand his al-Qaeda guests over to their tender mercies. So they had invaded Mahmud Gul’s country. He had fought them for that, and he was still fighting