* By focusing on Kabul, Taliban can undermine the last vestiges of support for the regime

        Daily Times of Lahore

LAHORE: Afghanistan's insurgents have a new target "“ Kabul, and the belt of towns and villages surrounding the capital, according to a Newsweek report.

"Today the Taliban are here," says Maidan Shar's white-smocked pharmacist Syed Mohammad, 32. "Tomorrow they may be in Kabul." A supply convoy was attacked in his home village, a dot on the map called Pul Surkh, where he says insurgents now travel freely, packing new AK-47s and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers. A series of spectacular recent terrorist incidents have shaken Kabul, a city that is all too familiar with violence. Blast walls and barbed wire have sprouted to defend against suicide bombers. Residents are afraid to travel even a few miles outside the city. To some, the report says, the Afghan capital is beginning to feel like a new Baghdad.

That's exactly what the Taliban want. The insurgents can't approach the firepower of the US-led coalition and its Afghan National Army allies. "No one is going to take Kabul or any provinces or province capitals, or establish the Revolutionary Republic of Afghanistan," says a senior Western diplomat, asking not to be named. But the militants seem to have realised what the US military did just before its surge in Iraq: that instability in the capital has an outsized psychological impact on a country.

So the Taliban have launched a surge of their own. By focusing on Kabul "we can create panic and undermine the last vestiges of support for the regime," says a senior Taliban intelligence operative in Pakistan, declining to be named for security reasons. Mullah Bari Khan, a Taliban commander in Ghazni province, says the group is pushing its agents and fighting men into Kabul from surrounding provinces. Khan claims Taliban strategists have divided Kabul into 15 zones. Each one is supposedly to get its own operatives, with some bringing their families along to serve as cover while they work to recruit local support and prepare for new attacks.

The Taliban's psy-war offensive has been deadly and effective so far, the report says. In January, the group attacked the heavily guarded Serena Hotel, killing seven. And in July, a suicide bomber rammed his explosives-laden car into the Indian embassy, killing two Indian diplomats and some 58 other people.