Peshawar, Pakistan ? Biding their time under their elusive leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban are regrouping in mountain hide-outs, waiting for the present Afghan government to falter, a Taliban intelligence official in hiding said Sunday.

The official, Obeidullah, was a significant part of the Taliban command structure, as the deputy of Qari Ahmadullah, the intelligence chief targeted and killed by the U.S. led coalition in a bombing raid in December in eastern Afghanistan. Obeidullah oversaw Kargai, the military training camp where al Qaida and other radicals trained, north of Kabul.

“We are not unhappy, afraid or finished. We are just waiting, gathering our strength,” said Obeidullah.

He said Omar was safe and in Afghanistan. “But the guest could be anywhere. He could be in Afghanistan, or Chechnya or Yemen,” Obeidullah said in a reference to Osama bin Laden.

Omar was in Shah-e-Kot in eastern Afghanistan – the scene of the largest U.S. ground assault in Afghanistan – following that battle in March, said Obeidullah. He spent 20 days in the stark, arid region crisscrossed by mountains after that March assault, dubbed Operation Anaconda.

The meeting with Obeidullah in Peshawar underscored the fact that senior fugitives of the U.S.-led war on terror are able to find safety in neighboring Pakistan, despite the presence of U.S. Special forces in Pakistan’s tribal belt that borders Afghanistan and coalition forces swarming the mountain peaks along the border.

It was arranged through an intermediary. A telephone call directed the car to the nondescript Shahzad hotel, in the middle of the bustling Saddar Road market and then to a ramshackle kiosk.

A boy wearing the woolen cap now associated with Afghanistan’s interim regime emerged, followed by Obeidullah, who quickly got into the car that then wove through a maze of narrow streets, past open sewers and narrow buildings jammed up one against the other, to a padlocked room hidden behind high walls and steel gates.

From his hide-out in Peshawar, a city of 1.5 million about 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of the Afghan border, Obeidullah said the Taliban in Afghanistan were waiting – and confident.

“There aren’t just 100 or 200 of us – there are thousands … (and) we know how to fight a guerrilla war,” said Obeidullah. “We will give this government time to show the people how they aren’t able to govern, then we will show our face more and more.”

Obeidullah said senior members of both Taliban and al Qaida move relatively freely in Afghanistan despite the six-month-old U.S.-led war on terror that had B-52 bombers pummeling mountains with 15,000 pound bombs and crack commando units scouring the peaks for loyalists of the outlawed movements.

With bitter fighting between rival warlords turning cities and towns in eastern Afghanistan into war zones, many people there say they long for the relative security that existed during the Taliban rule.

Obeidullah said fugitive Taliban are taking advantage of the anarchy in eastern Afghanistan’s Khost, Paktika and Paktia provinces to establish small cells in villages and towns throughout the east and south and create the core of a revived Taliban movement.

In eastern Afghanistan, where U.S. special forces and their allies are concentrating their resources, other Afghan sources say senior figures like Egyptian Ayman al Zawahri, bin Laden’s lieutenant and convicted killer of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Maulvi Abdul Kabir, the No. 3 man in the Taliban movement, have been sighted but escaped.

Pakistan’s intelligence service, the InterServices Intelligence, supported the Taliban until the country’s about face six months ago to join the U.S.-led war on terror, and it’s search for Taliban is not an all out effort, said Obeidullah.

“They aren’t really looking for us but we have to be careful,” he said stroking his wispy black beard, hid while in public by a portion of the black turban worn by the Taliban.

Still, Obeidullah was jumpy. Although the room was padlocked from within, a knock on the door, a horn blaring sent his eyes glancing nervously toward the door.

“This is the pressure I feel,” he said. “I won’t in Peshawar for long.”

Despite the U.S. Special forces in Pakistan’s tribal belt and coalition forces scouring the mountain peaks along the border, Obeidullah said he would make it home safely.

“It’s a long border, with so many ways to cross,” he explained. “If not one way then I will go another. It’s not a problem. I just came from Afghanistan.”

“It was easy.”