They sit inside their homes, usually mansions by the standards here, for hours each day, taking phone calls and having meetings. The houses are almost always heavily guarded by private Kalishnikov-toting security agents. Servants keep the cups of tea flowing. Visitors come and go.
They are the anti-Taliban government in exile and they represent a factionalised, disparate collection of ethnicities and interests all eager to return to Afghanistan. Most of them have been in touch with some level of US military planners, and all of them seem impatient at this moment.
Even they are mindful of the bloody history they bear with each other, as their clans fought and scrapped after the Soviets left their homeland in 1992. Their in-fighting led to the chaos that allowed the disciplined Taliban to take over. Their differences have not evaporated: the Hazaras, the Uzbeks, the Tajiks, the Pashtuns, are all ethnic tribes whose differences are legion, even occasionally in the areas of religion. The Hazara, for example are Shia Muslims and deeply hated by the Pashtun Sunni Muslims.
In Quetta, just a few hours from the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, home of the Taliban, a collection of mujahideen wait for the order to return to the fight.
One commander here, who did not wish his name used, said that his on-the-ground intelligence in Kandahar reveals a city abandoned by the Taliban.
"There are not so many Talibs there now, maybe 400," he said. His men, he says, number between 5,000 and 10,000. They could march on Kandahar right now and take over the city, he insists.
But they must wait for a co-ordinated plan that he, and others, hope every day will come from the US.
Inside Afghanistan, near Bamiyan, Karim Khalil, a Shia Hazara leader, monitors the movements of the Taliban and communicates with his associates in Quetta via satellite phone. He remembers well September 13th, 1998, the day that Bamiyan fell to the Taliban. Mr Khalil and his overwhelmed troops retreated to the mountains. In one village near Bamiyan, the Taliban killed 50 old Hazara men in the days after.
Mr Khalil, arguably the leader of the 3.5 million Hazaras in Afghanistan, has repelled the Taliban before, certainly with the help of Iranian-supplied military equipment. Now he waits for the right moment to fight again.
In Peshawar, Abdul Haq, a legendary guerrilla commander in the war against the Soviets, returned a week ago from his self-imposed exile in Dubai to wait to fight. Now he sits in a villa, entertaining journalists on his veranda and dreaming of a return to power.
Elsewhere, the old crowd gathers on the front line: the Uzbek commander Rashid Dostum is part of the United Front, for now; General Fahim, a Tajik, is trying to fill the considerable shoes of the slain General Ahmed Shah Massoud.
Many of these men, including the commander in Quetta and Mr Khalil, are frustrated at what seems a lull in US military planning. The word from Washington is that the US has not cottoned to the idea of the United Front - or any fractionalised part of it - marching onto Kabul and Kandahar and taking over the cities.
If the continuing reports of Taliban defections and weakness are true - a big if - the only thing stopping a full ground assault on the Taliban is lack of direction from Washington.
The pace of the military campaign may make sense a world away, but each night of televised air assaults in Afghanistan increases the tension in Pakistan, exposing the fissures that threaten the stability of Gen Pervez Musharraf's government.
On Friday morning Quetta looked like a city under siege. There was no violence during the day, no repeat of the fires and lootings and rock-throwing seen a week earlier.
But in the place of chaos and violence was a military police state. Every street was guarded by police: a paramilitary group, the Frontier Corps, and the army were stationed in great numbers throughout the city.
An uprising would have been impossible without massive bloodshed. A polite if raucous rally by pro-Taliban supporters was instead held in the late afternoon in the city's football stadium.
Things were not so calm in Karachi, where protesters burnt cars, hurled stones and torched an American-owned Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant.