AFGHANISTAN - The Coming Challenges: The Regime's Opponents - Part 5.

The US-backed regime of Hamid Karzai has a wide variety of opponents, ranging from an enemy coalition that groups the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda to the Islamic Mujahedeen of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar to warlords supposed to be part of a pro-Kabul alliance but each working for his own benefit, and rival elements of the Northern Alliance on which the Americans depended in its war that toppled the Taliban regime in late 2001.

In parallel is the role of Pakistan which, under Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is fighting along side the US against terrorism which by implication is supposed to be helping Karzai's regime. On the other hand, the Pakistanis have their own agenda which allows some elements of Musharraf's regime to act in such a way as to give many of Karzai's opponents the opportunity of benefiting in their campaign against his authority.

Pakistan, meanwhile, last week detained at least 100 Islamic activists in Karachi after a suicide attack on a Shiite mosque in the southern port city on May 7 left 15 worshippers dead. The attack, one of the worst of its kind in long-running tensions between Pakistan's hardline Sunnis and its minority Shiite community, prompted protests by Shiite in parts of Karachi on May 8 that left at least one person dead. The government has cancelled some college exams that were scheduled for Karachi last week and ordered a fresh review of security arrangements for the main Shiite centres of worship across Pakistan. The attack came at a bad time for a Musharraf regime eager to claim success for laying the foundations for the country's economic recovery. The attack harmed the view that economic conditions in Pakistan were broadly improving. There was also fresh criticism of Musharraf's policy of building bridges to mainstream Islamic political groups, including some known for their sympathy to the Taliban and members of Al-Qaeda.

Islamists who opposed Musharraf's decision to back the US-led war on terror emerged as the third largest group in Pakistan's federal parliament and formed the government in two provinces during elections supervised by Musharraf in 2002. A Western diplomat was last week quoted as saying: "The attack in Karachi seems the result of continuing attacks by hardline Sunnis on Shiites, as we have seen before in Pakistan...To curb this kind of thing from happening again, the government has to aggressively confront Islamic hardline groups using all means". (The separation of Muslims into Shiite and Sunni groupings dates from a historic division in Islam. In Pakistan, attacks by Sunni hardliners on Shiite mosques and other places of worship intensified after the Iranian revolution of 1979).

The Taliban are active on various fronts. On May 5 they claimed responsibility for killing two Britons and their Afghan translator who were in eastern Afghanistan helping the UN prepare for the September elections. The victims worked for London-based Global Risk Strategies, which supplies security consultants for a UN programme to register voters for elections.

The deaths were the first among Afghan and foreign staff preparing the country's first post-Taliban election. Although the company blamed the attack on "local bandits", a Taliban commander, Mullah Sabir Momin, said by satellite phone from an undisclosed location that the Taliban were responsible and were stepping up attacks in the south. Momin said: "The two British nonbelievers and their Afghan translator were killed by the Taliban because the Taliban are killing all locals and foreigners who are helping the Americans to consolidate their occupation of Afghanistan". He said the killings took place in the Mandol district in eastern Nuristan Province. According to Ghulam Ullah Nuristani, police chief of the province, the three were killed after they visited a newly built clinic. "They went there despite local officials telling them it was not safe", he said. Farooq Wardak, the Afghan government's top election official, said the deaths would have "very serious consequences" - including deterring international monitors. "The election wouldn't have that much international credibility" in their absence, Wardak said. Almeida e Silva, the UN spokesman, said there would be "at least a delay" in voter registration in Nuristan, but he vowed that the process would proceed uninterrupted elsewhere. "It happened in a specific place", he said. "We look at security on a case-by-case basis".

Security worries have already delayed Afghanistan's parliamentary and presidential elections once - from June to September. Global Risk has been surveying parts of rural Afghanistan to help the UN decide where to open registration sites, with the UN pressing ahead with its plans to register 10m Afghan voters across the country, despite a surge in violence in recent weeks. The UN has registered almost 2m Afghans in eight major cities, but only started signing up voters in the lawless countryside on May 8.

President Karzai and the US military insist that logistics, not security, are the main challenge to the elections. But the UN has warned that the vote will fail if security is not improved. "This confirms what we've been talking about", Almeida e Silva said. "That security is a major element in this process".

Taliban remnants are active in southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan, where more than 700 people including aid workers, civilians, government and US-led troops and militants have been killed since last August. The deaths, mostly blamed on the militants, also include several attacks on the NATO-led foreign peacekeepers in Kabul. Two foreign men, one Swiss, were stabbed and stoned to death in Kabul on May 8. Stoning to death is a punishment proposed by Islam for adulterers. The practice was publicly administered by the Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.

US forces on May 8 detained 13 suspects in Zabul Province, near the Pakistani border, where resurgent Taliban militants have carried out a string of attacks on Afghan forces. The US did not say where they were taken. Afghan government officials have expressed concern that, after the torture scandals at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, any sign of widespread abuse could turn ordinary Afghans against the presence of foreign soldiers. But they remain supportive of the presence in Afghanistan of 20,000 US-led troops.