The Return Of The Taliban

Description: After the fall of the Taliban five years ago, some experts warned of a nightmare scenario in which the Taliban and Al Qaeda would escape from Afghanistan into neighboring Pakistan and set up new command centers far out of America's reach. That nightmare scenario has now come true. The Taliban controls large parts of the lawless tribal areas along the border. In a video obtained by FRONTLINE, the Taliban demonstrate their brutal brand of justice. After executing 17 people, said to be thieves, in front of a crowd of hundreds, they hung the bodies on poles for three days. "We have killed these people and sent them to God," a Taliban gunman says to the camera. "God will bring them to justice." FRONTLINE correspondent Martin Smith returns to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and presents a rare look inside this secret sanctuary in "Return of the Taliban." In a region long suspected of harboring Osama bin Laden and strictly off-limits to U.S. troops, Smith explores the complex web of alliances among the Taliban, Al Qaeda fighters and the Pakistani military, and analyzes the consequences for U.S. policy. After 9/11, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf pledged his country's support to America's fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, but he has struggled to control his own military and intelligence services -- which have long supplied money, weapons and military advisers to radical fighters in Afghanistan. For Pakistan, the benefits of cooperation with America have been clear. As President Musharraf tells FRONTLINE, "Defense cooperation has increased between the United States and Pakistan, and ... the debt relief that we got will account for about $4 to $5 billion." "Spying on the Home Front" also looks at a massive FBI data sweep in December 2003. On a tip that Al Qaeda "might have an interest in Las Vegas" around New Year's 2004, the FBI demanded records from all hotels, airlines, rental car agencies, casinos and other businesses on every person who visited Las Vegas in the run-up to the holiday. Stephen Sprouse and Kristin Douglas of Kansas City, Mo., object to being caught in the FBI dragnet in Las Vegas just because they happened to get married there at the wrong moment. Says Douglas, 'I'm sure that the government does a lot of things that I don't know about, and I've always been OK with that -- until I found out that I was included.' A check of all 250,000 Las Vegas visitors against terrorist watch lists turned up no known terrorist suspects or associates of suspects. The FBI told FRONTLINE that the records had been kept for more than two years, but have now all been destroyed.