Afghanistan related discussion - II

[SyedA]

Start here.

[A Haider]

Alliance asks UK to withdraw troops
Non-Afghan Taliban not ready to pull out of Kunduz; US planes bomb targets

By Behroz Khan & Hasan Khan

PESHAWAR: Tension is reported between the Northern Alliance and US-led allied forces due to heavy presence of the American and British combat troops at Kabul's Bagram airbase, as US planes heavily bombed Taliban positions around Kunduz and Kandahar on Saturday.

Pro-Rabbani Tajik spy master Gen Faheem asked the Britain to reduce the size of its troops. "Gen Faheem has asked the Americans to bring the number of Anglo-US troops to 15, because the heavy presence of the foreign troops was causing resentment among the soldiers of Northern Alliance", a source close to Gen Faheem informed.

The source said that situation was tense and the row over the number of foreign troops to be deployed at Bagram had still not been settled. According to an AFP report from London, British troops who flew into Bagram earlier this week will stay, a spokesman for the ministry of defence said, denying a reported rift with the Northern Alliance. "We can confirm that we have not had any such approach from the Northern Alliance leadership and none of our troops will be returning home from Bagram airbase," the spokesman said.

"We have spoken to our people in Kabul and they say there have been no difficulties with their presence at the air base," he added, denying reports that the Northern Alliance wanted most of the British troops to leave the base. Earlier, a senior official of the anti-Taliban coalition told AFP the British commandos were operating at the Bagram airbase without the agreement of the Northern Alliance. "The British forces perhaps have an agreement with the UN but not with us," Northern Alliance Defence Minister Mohammad Qassim Fahim said by telephone.

Around 100 Royal Marine commandos flew into Bagram on Thursday to pave the way for several thousand more troops to be sent to Afghanistan and to help safeguard aid supplies. But their precise role remains unclear, with Britain sending out mixed messages on whether they will actively chase down fleeing Taliban fighters and join the hunt for alleged terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.

The elite troops are at Bagram, 16 kilometres north-east of Kabul "solely because of the onset of winter to facilitate humanitarian aid and to coordinate the UN aid programme," Fahim said. "The Taliban, who were an obstacle to peace, have been eliminated. There is, therefore, no need for thousands of foreign troops," said the Northern Alliance minister. The Taliban denied that the militia's leader, Mulla Muhammad Omar, had surrendered control of Kandahar, a foreign ministry spokesman said. "It is wrong that we have surrendered or have the intention to do so to Bashar and Naqeebullah," spokesman Maulvi Najibullah told reporters at Spin Boldak, an Afghan border post leading into south-western Pakistan. "It is all propaganda of our anti-Taliban forces."

The spokesman said there had been clashes between the Taliban and opposition forces in Uruzgan, the northern neighbour of Kandahar province, but did not say that it had been lost by the Taliban. Top Pashtun tribal leader Hamid Karzai, who has the support of the United States, said on Friday that ethnic Pashtun anti-Taliban fighters had taken control of the province, where Omar was born. Eyewitnesses had earlier told AFP that some Taliban forces were seen leaving Kandahar, but there was no sign of the mass evacuation reportedly ordered by Omar.

Kandahar resident Babrak Ali said that a "small column" of Taliban vehicles had been seen leaving the city and was heading north-west towards Herat. Ali's account tallied with that given earlier by Karzai, who said there were signs the evacuation had already started. "Some Taliban forces are moving up north and probably they are leaving Kandahar city and there are some skirmishes," Karzai told CNN television.

Thousands of Taliban fighters are in Kandahar and the surrounding areas to defend the city and their religion, a Taliban spokesman told the Al-Jazeera television. "Our forces are in Kandahar and surrounding provinces," Muhammad Tayyeb Agha said. "Our forces, numbering thousands, have decided to defend Kandahar, the neighbouring provinces, Islam and law," said Agha, who was identified as a spokesman for Taliban supreme leader Mulla Omar. Agha said Omar and the entire leadership of the "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan" also remained in areas controlled by the Taliban.

A Peshawar-based Taliban diplomat, however, told The News: "Our leadership has decided in principle to vacate Kandahar and other provinces because of severe bombing of the civilian population". "We will be in contact with our people even after deserting cities and moving to mountains", the diplomat said. Taliban sources said that the US-led forces heavily bombed Kandahar and Kunduz provinces on Saturday and the main targets, they claimed, were civilian populations.

"We have the information that toll of civilian deaths is very high in Saturday's bombing in both Kandahar and Kunduz", the Taliban diplomat said. According to an agency report, thousands of Taliban troops holed up in a key northern Afghan province exchanged artillery and rocket fire with Northern Alliance units on Saturday as a deadline for their surrender expired, the opposition said.

The mayor of Kunduz city, which straddles a strategically important road leading north to Tajikistan and south to Kabul, had asked the Northern Alliance to delay any advance while he negotiated with the Taliban. "We have surrounded the Kunduz province but unfortunately we have not captured it yet," said Zubai, a Northern Alliance Foreign Ministry official, speaking by telephone from Taloqan about 60 km to the east of Kunduz.

Zubai said the two-day deadline expired on Saturday, "but no one can guarantee when the (large-scale) fighting will start". US warplanes pounded Taliban positions during the night, he said, and on the ground both sides were exchanging artillery and rocket fire." The mayor of Kunduz is negotiating with local Taliban and they say they will give up the city for you. "But the foreign Taliban will never accept this," he said.

Fears of a bloodbath have been aroused by reports that foreign Taliban fighters in the province feel they have nothing to lose following assertions by Northern Alliance officials that they will kill every one of them. "There are more than 30,000 Taliban in Kunduz, but I think less than 10,000 are foreigners -- Arabs, Pakistanis, Chechens, Uzbeks and Bangladeshis," said Zubai.

The Taliban lost more areas and vacated Asmar, Angam, Naray, Nishgam and Barikot in Eastern Afghanistan to the opposition forces, said former mujahid commander Malik Muhammad Zareen. "We are in full control of Asmar, Angam, Naray, Nishgam and Barikot," Zareen told The News on telephone from district Asmar in Khost province in eastern Afghanistan

According to an AFP report, the Taliban have pulled out of western Farah province and retreated south, leaving the main city in a state of violent chaos, the Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) reported Saturday. The Pakistan-based news agency said the Islamic militia was withdrawing toward Helmand province to the south-east, neighbouring Kandahar. It said Farah city had been evacuated and there were reports of looting and fighting among various groups in which several people had been killed. The loss of the capital signals the loss of the province in Afghan terms.

US warplanes have attacked the home of a key Taliban commander in Afghanistan, the AIP reported amid intensified US strikes against the Islamic militia's leadership. The house of top commander Jalaluddin Haqqani and a seminary were bombed overnight on Friday near the eastern town of Khost, leaving two people dead and many others wounded, the AIP said. "The American objective was to hit Haqqani. Previously his house in Kabul and Gardez were attacked in which several people were killed," a spokesman for Haqqani was quoted as saying. Haqqani is a powerful Taliban military chief and minister for tribal and frontier affairs.

Broad-based govt soon: Rabbani

KABUL: Afghanistan's ousted president Burhanuddin Rabbani returned to Kabul on Saturday, five years after he was driven out by the Taliban, vowing to build a new broad-based government. "The victory does not belong to one ethnic group but all Afghan people," he declared, in a bid to quell fears his mainly Tajik supporters plan to seize power for themseleves and thwart UN moves to broker a power-sharing deal. Rabbani threw the accusation of foot-dragging back at the world body. "If there is a delay because of the United Nations, we should not be blamed," he said, adding "We will try to form a broad-based government as soon as possible, it depends on the seriousness of the Afghan people and the United Nations." Northern Alliance leaders have said Rabbani should head any transitional authority until elections can be held, amid fears that Afghanistan could fall back into the bloody faction fighting that marred its previous rule.

[SyedA]

My opinion:

NA and Taliban deligation will meet within a week to discuss how to end the deud among afghans and fight the outsiders, in this case UK and US troops. Everyone has said from the beginning that Afghans wil fight with each other until they have an enemy to fight, and now they got it.

I think the only the benefit UK is getting out of this conflict is the oil in the future.

Lets sit and watch, drama has started.

[H Khan]

By Myra MacDonald


SRINAGAR, India, Nov 18 (Reuters) - Islamic militants are likely to try to make their way into the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir as they are routed in Afghanistan and then in turn pushed out of Pakistan, the Indian army chief in the tense border region said.

In a weekend interview with Reuters, Lieutenant General J.R. Mukherjee said the army was stepping up its efforts to stop guerrillas coming across the Line of Control which divides disputed Kashmir between India and Pakistan. But he denied charges by Pakistan that India was moving more troops to Kashmir.

He said militants from Afghanistan's Taliban militia -- which has lost control of most of the country after six weeks of U.S. bombing -- were undoubtedly coming in to Pakistan, despite Islamabad's attempts to seal off its Afghan frontier.

"Pakistan cannot afford to let them stay. So either they export them outside or they export them to Kashmir. A fair proportion will definitely try and be pumped in into Kashmir," he said at his headquarters in Srinagar.

Pakistan, which turned against its Taliban allies after the September 11 attacks on the United States, is under pressure from Washington to curb Islamic militancy at home as well. Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf can scarcely afford to host thousands of fleeing militants, many of whom are Arab volunteers.

India wants Musharraf to end what it calls Pakistan's sponsorship of "cross-border terrorism"in Kashmir. Islamabad denies it arms or funds the Islamic militants who then cross the Himalayan mountains to join a nearly 12-year-old insurgency against Indian rule which has killed at least 30,000 people.

Mukherjee said that despite U.S. pressure, there had been no let-up in Pakistan's promotion of militancy in Kashmir, apart from in the first week or so after the September 11 attacks.

"They were a little bewildered and couldn't get clear-cut orders from across (the border). After that it is quite apparent that there were clear orders to them that Kashmir will carry on as before," he said.

In the biggest single act of violence, 38 people were killed when suicide bombers from a Pakistan-based militant group attacked Kashmir's state assembly in Srinagar on October 1.

Mukherjee said that well over a half of the 2,850 to 3,300 "terrorists" operating in Jammu and Kashmir were outsiders - mostly from Pakistan, though also from Afghanistan and as far away as Yemen and Britain.

"They have been demoralised to a certain extent by events in Afghanistan, particularly over the last few days and therefore what we do discern is every possible effort being made to try and step up their morale by issuing orders, carrying out more fedayeen (suicide) actions and so on. They desperately need to see some success," he said.

"I see an active period ahead," he said. "We'll try our best to ensure it doesn't get worse, but I see every possible attempt made to pump in more and more, including possibly the Taliban who have run out of Afghanistan. Pakistan can't afford to keep them on their hands either. It's too early to make a categorical statement but at least that is what it appears."

Mukherjee declined to comment on whether he believed Indian troops should cross the 742-km (464-mile) Line of Control to attack militants in Pakistan, copying the example of the United States in hunting out its perceived enemies in Afghanistan.

But he said that in Kashmir troops had been stepped up along the military ceasefire line to stop infiltration by militants.

"As far as Kashmir is concerned we have definitely stepped up the quantum of troops along the Line of Control," he said. But there were no more troops in the region as a whole than before.

"I have only two divisions worth of troops on the Line of Control and two divisions worth of troops for counter-insurgency operations," he said, putting the strength of an Indian division at about 10,000 to 12,000 men each.

Both nuclear-capable foes have accused the other of moving up troops towards the Line of Control, raising fears the sporadic gunfire regularly exchanged across the ceasefire line could escalate into a full-scale battle.

India says it fires across the Line of Control to stop the Pakistani army from giving cover to militants coming into Kashmir.

Mukherjee said India had been fairly successful in reducing infiltration this year and should be able to stop many Islamic militants from coming in from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"We have adopted a very strong counter-infiltration posture...with the same number of divisions that we haveand we are quite sure that we would be able to stop a flood from coming in," he said.

00:09 11-18-01

[Sultan]

http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/11/18/wafg118.xml&sSheet=/news/2001/11/18/ixhome.html

[Waqqas]

Answering FarazA from thread I:

I don't think it is a matter of this article writer being a traitor. It is actually heartening to see that our country has people that differ on issues and discuss the wider implications of various actions (without taking to the streets and burning cars and businesses, that is!).

I think even the "silent majority" in Pakistan is growing increasingly wary of the real US agenda. Now they are even speaking of establishing a command center in Pakistan (as they have in other overseas bases). This sure does not sound like a short campaign.

Also, look at the way they are behaving after the fall of Kabul. Notice how the flow of foreign leaders has suddenly stopped ...

We will not get any significant amount of help, whether it be cash or military hardware. The peanuts they have offered till now don't even cover the economic losses we are suffering after September 11.

The British PM has even talked about the need to weed out terrorism from Kashmir.

Is there a pattern here?

Now the question is not only what we should have done with regard to this entire conflict, but what we HAVE to do in the future to save our own interests. There are very clear sign wrt what they will target after they finish Afghanistan. We need to wake up and start preparing.

[H Khan]

Cricket player for Afghan bretherns


Pakistani cricket players Saeed Anwar (R), Wasim Akram (C) and Waqar Younis announce their participation in a fundraising campaign for Afghan refugees, in Lahore November 17, 2001. The cricketing heroes urged fellow Pakistanis to give clothes and other goods and announced that Pakistan's entire cricket team would visit some cities to collect the donations. REUTERS/Mohsin Raza

[Gaf]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1662000/1662653.stm

[Farooq]

Uzbek/Tajikstan !!!

[Maisum Ali]

Chaos in Jalalabad


By Zulfiqar Ali

JALALABAD, Nov 17: More than 5,000 armed people of Commander Hazrat Ali, a supporter of the Hizb-i-Islami (Younas Khalis group), have occupied important buildings and strategic points in and around the Jalalabad city in order to turn it into their own fiefdom.

A large number of contenders for the governorship of the Nangarhar province are trying to bargain with different factions and splinter groups of old Mujahideen organizations.

Haji Zaman Ghamshareek, a supporter of the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, led by Pir Syed Ahmad Gillani, is said to have won over the support of Pakistan to install himself in the coveted position. On the other hand, Haji Abdul Qadeer, a former governor of the province and the brother of slain Afghan commander Abdul Haq, is trying to wrest the governorship of the province from other contenders with the tacit support of Northern Alliance forces, nesting in Kabul.

Commander Hazrat Ali, who has the blessings of Maulvi Younas Khalis, has already occupied main installations and made his position stronger than others to combat any mishap.

The city is gripped by uncertainty and confusion and no one knows what the fate of its residents and would-be rulers would be in the next few days.

The leaders of the Eastern Zone Shoora held meetings on Friday to chalk out a power-sharing formula, but they have yet not come out with an acceptable solution to all.

On Friday evening, Haji Qadeer, Haji Zaman and Commander Hazrat Ali approached Younas Khalis to decide about the slot of governorship so as to end uncertainty in the province.

Hoards of armed men, belonging to Commander Hazrat Ali, have reportedly looted offices of some Jalalabad-based NGOs. Only lawlessness and guns reign supreme in the city.

The only UN Office, which was operating till Thursday noon, has also been closed down. It shows the magnitude of uncertainty, which is looming large over the skies of Jalalabad.

A lieutenant of Hazrat Ali told Dawn that they had control over the city. "Now we are seeking a formal signal from Maulvi Younas Khalis to run the province", he added.

On Friday night, US fighter planes continued their sorties on what they called bases of the Al-Qaeda network around Jalalabad.

The residents were afraid of the continuing bombardment and were not feeling any change after the retreat of the Taliban militia. The conflicting claims, being made by the contending groups, have added to the apprehensions of the people. The rising anarchy is heading towards a sort of civil war.

[Gaf]

It is quite unfortunate that the "baboons" have unrestricted access to Scientific American to vent their propoganda against Pakistan...

http://www.sciam.com/2001/1201issue/1201ramana.html

[hassany]

November 18, 2001
Noose is tightening around bin Laden
By ERIC MARGOLIS
Contributing Foreign Editor
Osama bin Laden has survived at least 10 assassination attempts mounted by the Soviets, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. But now, after the rapid retreat of Taliban forces and fall of Kabul to the Northern Alliance, the noose is tightening around the world's most wanted man.

The Taliban's retreat was inevitable. Its 30,000, lightly-armed tribal fighters spread over a Texas-sized nation could not withstand massive U.S. air attacks and Northern Alliance Tajik and Uzbek troops freshly supplied by Russia with tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery. The Taliban's deftly executed surprise retreat wrong-footed the U.S. and Pakistan, who didn't want the Alliance to occupy Kabul before they could cobble together a government of their own choosing.

The Northern Alliance is a proxy for Russia. Its two military leaders are Gen. Rashid Dostam, a brutal communist warlord who slaughtered 30,000 civilians in the 1990s, and Gen. Mohammad Faheem, a senior officer of Khad, the former Afghan communist secret police, an arm of the Soviet KGB. Khad's forces tortured and murdered thousands of Afghans.

To Washington's embarrassment, the Alliance also controls Afghanistan's opium and heroin exports. The Taliban, a religious movement, had shut down the drug trade. The war against terrorism has plainly taken priority over the war on drugs.

Handing northern Afghanistan and Kabul over to the Russians appears the price the U.S. had to pay for Moscow's support in the hunt for bin Laden. As this column has long warned, if the Taliban was overthrown it would be replaced by the even more brutal Uzbek-Tajik alliance dominated by Russia. Having ousted the Russians from Afghanistan in the 1980s, Washington has now invited them back in. So far, clever Vladimir Putin is the big winner in the Afghan mess.

Mullah Omar, the Taliban's leader, ordered his men to retreat into Pashtun territory in southwest Afghanistan, and into neighbouring Pakistan's ethnic Pashtun Northwest Frontier Province (NFP). This wild region, birthplace of the Taliban, is only under nominal control of Pakistan's government. The NFP's heavily armed Pashtun tribesmen are a law unto themselves.

Taliban says it will now wage guerrilla warfare from NFP and from the central Hindu Kush mountains north of Kandahar. The Talibs believe guerrilla fighting will allow them to finally engage U.S. troops hunting for bin Laden at more equal odds. Unless the Taliban quickly collapses from mass defections, the war has entered a new phase.

ON SCHEDULE

The U.S. military plan for Afghanistan is on schedule. The overthrow of the Taliban regime has opened the way for U.S. special forces to hunt down bin Laden, who is believed hiding in cave complexes north of Kandahar that he helped build during the jihad against the Soviets. It is essential for the U.S. to capture bin Laden or at least recover his body. If he somehow escapes, or is buried alive in a cave, the U.S. will be unable to proclaim victory and will have to face charges it tore apart Afghanistan, killed large numbers of civilians and created tens of thousands of refugees - for nothing.

Last week, pro-Taliban sources in Pakistan reported bin Laden vowed he will not be taken alive, a position perfectly in keeping with his record as a courageous fighter against the Soviets and a "mujahed," or holy warrior, ready to become "shahid," or martyred, for his faith.

The multi-million-dollar reward being offered by the U.S. for bin Laden will certainly tempt local tribesmen and even some Taliban leaders to hand him over to the Americans. Sudden betrayal and double-dealing are the norm in Afghanistan. Pakistan's military government would also reap huge additional rewards from the U.S. by handing over bin Laden.

Last week, President George Bush authorized closed military tribunals for the first time since World War II. They are clearly designed to avoid having bin Laden and his associates, if captured, stand trial in open courts where they could defend themselves and win sympathy in the Third World. These hanging courts, which are sure to hand down death sentences, are more worthy of the Soviet Union than the United States.

There is still a remote chance the elusive bin Laden could escape. He may slip across the border into the Northwest Frontier and be hidden by friendly Pashtun tribesmen. There is much sympathy for the Taliban and bin Laden in Pakistan. Some Islamist officers of Pakistan's army or intelligence service might aid bin Laden's escape. But it will be very difficult for the world's most notorious man to change his appearance. Bin laden is over 6 foot 4, gaunt, and possesses the world's most famous face.

There are very few places where he could hide. Nations like Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria or Indonesia would be unable to withstand American pressure to hand him over. Bin Laden and Iraq's Saddam Hussein are bitter enemies. Libya is lying low. Iran and the Russian satellite states of Central Asia are his bitter enemies. China is hostile. Wherever bin Laden might find refuge, he is almost certain to be sold to the U.S. for cash or political favours.

The day bin Laden openly declared a one-man war against the U.S. over Israel, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, he signed his own death warrant.

[SyedA]

The killing of Mohammed Atef, bin Laden's chief lieutenant and chosen successor as leader of the al-Qa'eda, is believed to have dealt a blow to morale within the terrorist network.



How the hell do they know he is dead, I mean what is the assumption? Or is to make the americans happy and feed their ego? I doubt any of this news coming out is true. Anything that comes out of UK or US newspapers are 95% propaganda and 5% fantasizing.


The most fierce attacks have come from Arab and Pakistani fighters, who are prepared to fight to the death because they assume that they will be killed if captured by anti-Taliban forces.



Very interesting, wonder how many Pakistanis are still there fighting.


It is assumed that the terrorist leader may be disguised. He is also thought to have several lookalikes dispersed around Afghanistan.

This is the 5% I am talking about!!

[SyedA]

ERIC MARGOLIS article is pretty insightful. He is right that Russia is back in atthe invitation of US. If russia providing arms then obviously they have a big say in the future govt. setup in Afghanistan. It is ironic that US was fighting Russia in the past afghan war, more so that Putin was a intelligence officers in KGB most likely serving in Afghanistan, now both US and Putin govt are fighting the same people they fought over a decade oe so ago!!!

What Pakistan needs to do for a secure western border is to get the dostum and faheem assasinated. Get on the leaders bribed and get thme to take these two leaders out. This is very important that any pro-communist leaders be taken out of this picture ASAP.

[AkramIshaqKhan]

There are two groups that fight the hardest in Afghanistan. Even the NA recognize this a say that the Pakistanis and Arab fighters are the fiercest. I am so SAD :( at what is happening with the poor Arab and Pakistani fighters in Kunduz. I mean these guys are so far removed from the happening in Sept 11. For them it is their conviction of religion, and struggle for life that makes them fight. May God give them justice, and eternal peace.

JK.

[Gaf]

I haven't heard a 'peep' out of Musharraf since he landed back in Pakistan..... i wonder what he has to say for himself.

It is unfortunate that the fighters, numbering about 20,000 (according to NewsNight) have been abandoned in Kunduz. I don't see how they can survive, especially with B52's bombing them. It seems that the troops are prepared to negiotate a handover of the city under guaranteed UN control but it seems that all the Americans+N.Alliance are interested in is a bloodbath.........

Given that the N.A. have become the goverment (with the exception of course, of the "lip service" to a broad based goverment), i don't at present see how Pakistan can influence events in Afghanistan.

If the Taliban left Kandahar, and handed control over to a Pashtun leader, then Pakistan potentially have some leverage through this as this important city will not be under N.Alliance control. If however, Kandahar 'falls' to the Northern Alliance, then Pakistan, and more importantly the Pashtuns have no leverage left at all, since they will not be "players"........

[Uzair]

The south is still under Pushtun control though, but not the central government of course.

[Saad Hasan]

Originally posted by jkhan
There are two groups that fight the hardest in Afghanistan. Even the NA recognize this a say that the Pakistanis and Arab fighters are the fiercest. I am so SAD :( at what is happening with the poor Arab and Pakistani fighters in Kunduz. I mean these guys are so far removed from the happening in Sept 11. For them it is their conviction of religion, and struggle for life that makes them fight. May God give them justice, and eternal peace.

JK.

I see major shift in your stance as oppose to a couple of months ago....

[FarazA]

Waqqas,
I understand what you are saing. I just heard this morning DR. Israr Ahmed's lecture about The Great wars. If you can get hands on it it is very interesting. Interms of Sunnahs and the current situtions and also the 1990 Gulf war. I will post in more details later tonite. InshahAllah.

[SyedA]

Afghan opposition plays hard-to-get on UN power-sharing plan: KABUL, Nov 18: Leaders of Northern Alliance kept their cards to their chests today over UN moves to convene a power-sharing council with representatives from the dominant Pashtun ethnic group and other factions. Spearheading the diplomatic push was UN envoy to Afghanistan Francesc Vendrell who was expected to meet today with ousted president Burhanuddin Rabbani. Vendrell is urging the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance, which seized control of the Afghan capital in dramatic fashion last Tuesday, to meet other Afghan factions in a neutral country. The top diplomat was "holding talks with senior Afghan officials" about a timeframe for setting up a broad-based post-Taliban regime in Afghanistan, a UN official in Kabul told AFP today.

[H Khan]

.c The Associated Press


OTTAWA (AP) - An international conference to discuss a reconstruction program for Afghanistan will be held Nov. 27-29 in Pakistan, World Bank President James Wolfensohn said Sunday.

The conference in Islamabad will be led by the World Bank, the U.N. Development Program and the Asian Development Bank. An initial meeting held by the United States and Japan is scheduled for Tuesday in Washington, with the World Bank and U.N. development agency taking part, Wolfensohn said.

Any reconstruction plan would be implemented only when humanitarian relief efforts have been completed and a political solution has been found, he said.

``We would not want to go for a reconstruction plan decided by foreigners for a government that has not come into place,'' Wolfensohn told reporters at the end of World Bank-International Monetary Fund talks in Ottawa.

A World Bank statement said the conference agenda would include ways to stimulate agricultural recovery and generate employment, along with developing education and health services and rebuilding essential infrastructure such as roads and irrigation networks.

There was no cost estimate, but the statement said reconstruction was expected to be high.

AP-NY-11-18-01 1825EST

[AkramIshaqKhan]

Check this out. This is the first time - Now Kashmiri rebels are being called PAKISTANI MILITANTS.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/649816.asp?0dm=C315N

This is a diaster.

JK.

[Gul Khan]

Originally posted by jkhan
Check this out. This is the first time - Now Kashmiri rebels are being called PAKISTANI MILITANTS.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/649816.asp?0dm=C315N

This is a diaster.

JK.

MSNBC is an Indian mouth piece it even has an office in the terrorist state.

[SyedA]

Taliban agree to surrender Kunduz


By M. Ismail Khan

PESHAWAR, Nov 18: The Taliban surrounded in Afghanistan's northern Kunduz province agree to surrender before a UN-supervised neutral authority as incessant US bombings leave hundreds dead and wounded.

"We have authorized the governor of the province to take necessary steps in this respect," Mulla Fazil, the Taliban's chief commander for Afghanistan's northern zone told Dawn by satellite telephone from Kunduz on Sunday night.

He said that 800 people had died in one of the heaviest bombings on Kunduz in the last two days, and over 250 were killed in Khanabad district on Saturday, he said.

The Taliban, however, have made it clear they would under no circumstances surrender to the Northern Alliance. "We don't trust them," Fazil said. 20

The puritanical militia has been alarmed by the killings in Mazar-i-Sharif and Kabul by the Northern Alliance forces.

The Taliban have set out four conditions to surrender Kunduz:

* They would surrender the province only to a neutral Afghan under the UN supervision;

* Foreign fighters, including Arabs and Chechen supporters of Osama bin Laden would be handed over to the UN to be sent back to their respective countries;

* Heavy weapons would be surrendered to the neutral caretakers; and

* The Taliban should be allowed a safe passage to disperse and go home.

Afghan sources put the total number of Taliban troops holed up in Kunduz at between 20,000 to 25,000 and a significant number of Arab and other foreign fighters linked to Osama's Al Qaeda organization.

Earlier, Mulla Dadullah, a top Taliban commander, dismissed reports of Taliban's proposed surrender to the UN as "lies". However, he said: "We are prepared to resolve this matter through negotiations," Dadullah, who with two other top Taliban commanders, Mulla Fazil and Mullla Berather, are in Kunduz.

A Taliban official clarified: "Our promise made to those negotiating a peaceful transition holds."

Dadullah who had gone to Mazar-i-Sharif with 8,000 men late last month to preempt its fall later returned to Kunduz, but could not leave as all routes leaving the northern province #had been cut off and seized by the Northern Alliance forces.

Haji Omar Khan, the brother of a former Mujahideen commander and late governor, Arif Khan, who was shot and killed by unknown assailants in Peshawar last year, rules the Pakhtoon-dominated Kunduz.

Earlier, tribal elders from Kunduz told a news conference in Peshawar that the Taliban were prepared to surrender and support a neutral administration.

Afghan sources said that the Taliban's offer had been communicated to the US and Britain.

Tayyab Agha, personal secretary to Taliban supreme leader, Mulla Muhammad Omar, acknowledged that the Taliban were faced with difficulties in Kunduz but denied having knowledge of a possible surrender.

The Kandahar governor, Mulla Muhammad Hassan Rahmani told BBC Pushto Service: "The people of Kunduz continue to support the Taliban and are prepared to resist the Northern Alliance."

He claimed that the situation in the Taliban's spiritual headquarters was calm and peaceful. "People are happy," he said but added that 20 to 25 people were killed in the US bombing in Kandahar on Sunday.

[MohammedA]

Pakistan detains Islamic 'army leader'


The tribesmen have machine guns and swords

An Islamic leader who led thousands of Pakistanis across the border to support the Taleban in Afghanistan has been arrested, his son has confirmed.
Maulana Sufi Mohammed was detained by paramilitary police on Sunday when he slipped back into Pakistan, his son Fazllulah told Reuters news agency.

Fazllulah said about 1,000 of his father's followers were still missing in Afghanistan.

Mohammed is the head of Tehreek Nifaz-e-Sharia Mohammadi, a group which supports the imposition of Islamic Sharia law in Pakistan.

'Robbed by Afghans'

Mohammed and many of his supporters spent much of last week stranded in the border area because Pakistani border guards insisted they leave their weapons behind.



He was arrested near the town of Parachinar, some 250 kilometres (150 miles) north of Peshawar.

His supporters, who entered Afghanistan armed with machine guns, rocket launchers, axes and swords, began trying to get home after the Taleban retreated from the north of the country.

Fazllulah told the Associated Press news agency recently that many Afghans tried to rob his father's fighters of their weapons and money.

The Pakistan tribesmen gathered in response to calls for volunteers by local Islamic militants.

Most come from villages inside the North West Frontier Province, which has strong cultural and family ties with Afghanistan.

[MohammedA]

2 EX-COMMANDERS OF PAK NAVY DETAINED BY FBI-ISI TEAM.


By Mubashir Zaidi.
Two retired commanders of the Pakistan Navy have been detained by a joint FBI and ISI team for their suspected contacts with the Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, the daily Nation reported today.
Commander (Retd) Humayun Niaz and Commander (Retd) Arshad Chaudhry were picked up 10 days ago for interrogation. The detention was confirmed by Pakistani authorities today as well as a senior US official in Washington. "There was some concern that the detention of this guy would cause other people to defect to the Taliban," the unnamed US official told Boston Globe referring to Mr Niaz.
The two belonged to the NGO Ummah Tameer-e-Nau, or the Foundation for Reconstruction, founded by nuclear scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood who was detained last month but released after his family moved a mercy petition before President Pervez Musharraf.
Major General Rashid Qureshi, the Director General of Inter Services Public Relations, also confirmed the detention, disclosing that several others may also have been questioned.
"One would be interested in who has been to Afghanistan over the last few years, and why. There is no cause for alarm as these people were not entrusted with nuclear secrets or nuclear materials... there is no possibility at all of them being involved in passing nuclear secrets," Qureshi said.
He said the two commanders visited Afghanistan and also made irresponsible statements. The NGO that the duo was running for carrying out relief work in Afghanistan was not even registered in Pakistan.
(c) The Hindustan Times Ltd.

[MohammedA]

Pakistan seals Afghan border


There is fear that Taleban fighters will escape

By Adam Brookes on the Afghan border
Pakistani army officers say they have completely sealed their border with southern Afghanistan to prevent Taleban fighters escaping into Pakistan.

They say only the most vulnerable of refugees are being allowed across the border.



Only families with young children are crossing

Situated just a few metres from the border with southern Afghanistan, a road which is normally alive with commercial traffic and food aid pouring into Afghanistan is now almost completely empty.

The Pakistani officers based here told us that their principal worry is Taleban fighters trying to make their escape into Pakistan.

The soldiers say that they now have patrols, sensors and night vision equipment deployed along the border - from the deserts to the west, right through to the mountains in the east.

Turned back

Looking over the border from Pakistan groups of young Afghan men, who have been turned back, are clearly visible on the other side of the barbed wire.

It is terribly hard to say which of them might be Taleban, so Pakistan is keeping them all out.

Only families with young children are being allowed to cross into the dusty refugee camp nearby.

Two hundred and seventy families were allowed to cross on Sunday - about 1,000 people.

Uncertainty

They are fleeing the uncertainty that is engulfing southern Afghanistan.

Kandahar, the strategic key to the south, is one of the last Taleban strongholds and it is the city that might yield up the secret of Osama bin Laden's whereabouts.

Pashtun tribal groups say they are negotiating directly with the Taleban in Kandahar to get them to leave, but there is no indication whether and when that is going to happen.

[AkramIshaqKhan]

You are right Saad there is a shift in my views and I have openly acknowledged that in my previous posts. I am the first to accept when I am wrong.

JK.

[SyedA]

Another trip.... something major going on...!

Iranian deputy FM arrives in Pakistan
(Updated at 1230 PST)
ISLAMABAD: Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister, Mohsin Aminzadeh, arrived here on Monday for talks with Pakistani officials on developments in Afghanistan, informed sources

According to details, He will stay in the capital for two days and is expected to meet President Pervez Musharraf and Foreign Minister Abul Sattar. ”The talks will focus on the situation in Afghanistan and the ongoing political process to set up a broad-based government there," a foreign ministry official said.

[Sultan]

Looks like Rumsfeld wants the Taliban in Kunduz dead!

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011119/pl/attack_military_dc_4.html

[Sultan]

In addition to this news article there is talk of the US considering to try OBL in a US militry court IF he is caught alive.

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011119/pl/attack_bush_courts_dc_6.html

[Saad Hasan]

Actually, the position of US Admin. is to kill him than to actually try him in a court, whether military court or otherwise. OBL would most likely be killed, if found alive, he would be tried on one of ships in the Arabian sea and shot on the spot...It was also reported by one of the analyst that OBL also has a whole pandora box of US covert activity which would be a huge liability for US authorities if he were tried in hague type world court or a war crime tribunal..hence the urgency in activating the military courts.. This way US avoids any public scrutiny of the trial and OBL stays mortal not attaining martyrdom...

[H Khan]

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Islamabad urged the United Nations Monday to ensure that Pakistanis captured in current fighting in Afghanistan were treated according to the law even though it did not approve of them fighting there.

Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar told a news conference that if any Pakistanis had gone to Afghanistan "it was their own choice" but Islamabad would fulfill its responsibilities to its citizens.

He made the statement when asked about news reports that many Pakistanis were among thousands of Taliban fighters surrounded by Northern Alliance forces in the northern Afghan town of Kunduz.

"It will be important that all Afghans observe the principles of humanitarian law and refrain from reprisals or violence against those people who surrender," Sattar said.

"We have of course no role in this matter," he said, but added that Islamabad hoped the United Nations and the U.S-led coalition against terrorism would act together to prevent "excesses."

"The government of Pakistan has constantly maintained that Pakistani citizens have no business to go to a foreign country and fight on the side of one or the other group or faction," he said.

But he added: "Pakistan has a responsibility to its citizens. Even citizens who commit a violation of the law still receive protection of their government."

Pakistani, Arab and Chechen fighters supporting the Taliban and linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network are deeply unpopular among many Afghans. Following the opposition's military gains over the past 10 days many foreign fighters have been captured or killed.

"We too will fulfill our responsibility toward our nationals and make representation to the concerned authorities that these people should be dealt with in accordance with law and not subjected to any inhuman act on the part of their captors," Sattar said.

11:12 11-19-01

[H Khan]

.c Kyodo News Service


ISLAMBAD, Nov. 19 (Kyodo) - Pakistan has withdrawn its diplomatic staff from Afghanistan and no longer has functioning relations with the collapsed Taliban government, Pakistan's Foreign Minister Abdus Sattar said Monday.

But Sattar indicated the Pakistani government will allow the Taliban embassy in Islamabad to operate at least for the time being, saying that ''it doesn't imply'' that Pakistan is recognizing a particular Afghan government.

The status of the Taliban embassy in Pakistan, the only country where the Taliban still maintain a diplomatic mission, has come into question after they lost control of most of the country to anti-Taliban forces over the past two weeks.

''Under international law, the (Taliban) embassy in Pakistan is a mission of Afghanistan. It doesn't imply recognition of any government of Afghanistan,'' Sattar told a news conference.

Sattar said the Pakistani government will continue to provide diplomatic immunity to the Taliban ambassador, Abdul Salam Zaeef, who he said has been ''accredited as ambassador.''

''We will continue to do so in case of Zaeef, although the Taliban has collapsed. The Afghan embassy represents Afghanistan in our country,'' Sattar said.

AP-NY-11-19-01 1322EST

[H Khan]

.c Kyodo News Service


NARITA, Japan, Nov. 19 (Kyodo) - Japanese freelance journalist Daigen Yanagida criticized the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan on his return Monday from Pakistan after being held nearly a month by the Taliban for allegedly spying.

In a news conference at Narita airport, Yanagida, 37, described the campaign as a ''war of vested interests.'' He also criticized Japan for its plan to send troops in support of the military campaign.

The Tokyo native said the U.S.-led military campaign has brought a great deal of adversity to the Taliban. But he refused to go into detail.

''To see some good (Taliban) men wear a sad expression on their faces was a pity,'' Yanagida said as he recalled his experience being held by the Taliban militia. He was released Saturday in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad.

When asked how he spent his days during his detention, Yanagida said he sang songs to get by and said he did not suffer as much mentally as he had feared.

As for his plans after arriving in Japan, Yanagida told reporters he intends to take things slowly.

AP-NY-11-19-01 0446EST

[Farooq]

Britain is insisting on sending a force of 6000 soldiers to Afghanistan. The question why ???

The US is not committing any ground troops, or very few, the other European nations are sending a token force, why the determination of the British.

I wonder if its anything to do with laying to rest the bad memories of when they got mauled by the Afghans in the old British empire days. They can say, hey we finally went in there and conquered the natives (read Taliban/Pashtun), even though it took us a 100 years.

Is it a case of wanting to prove the above point, as well as salvaging their pride and in the process rubbing the Afghans noses in it ???.

[Uzair]

Fear of clash between Pukhtoons, NA refugees looming large
Updated on 2001-11-19 23:08:16


MINGORA, Nov 20 (PNS): District Administration of Swat has detained large number of Northern alliance refugees in wake of possible clash between local Pukhtoons and NA migrants of Malakand division after large-scale atrocities by Northern alliance forces in Kabul and Mazar Sharif.

The fear of violence between Malakand Locals and Supporters of northern alliance has increased after massacre of Pukhtoons and hostage of hundreds of members of Tehreek-e-Nafaz Shariat-e-Muhammadi. The district administration of Swat has therefore taken large number of NA supporters and raids are being conducted for the detention of others.

Meanwhile Citizens of district Bonier have warned Government of strict action against Northern alliance refugees if captured members of Tehreek-e-Nafaz Shariat-e-Muhammadi are not released by the forces in Afghanistan.

http://www.paknews.com/specialNews.php?id=186&date1=2001-11-19

[Sultan]

Britain is insisting on sending a force of 6000 soldiers to Afghanistan. The question why ???

Actually, I think it is more of a case of the US utilising British ground troops to achieve their objectives in Afghanistan. The US has a requirement to deploy a large contingent of troops in Afghanistan in order to secure their interest. However given the US troops incapabilities of operating efficiently and the high risk factor of deploying US troops in Afghanistan they would rather leave it up to the Brits to provide the vast majority of ground troops with considerable US air and naval support in the region. The British contingent is to be mainly made up of the RM along with specialist troops from the Para brigade and possibly Gurkhas. However, what u will notice from the selection of troops is that they have considerabe amount of experience in operating in conditions that are present in Afghanistan. As far as US troops are concerned well they will probably remain as small units of special ops with the bulk of troops consisting of Brits. We all know how the US Rangers faired against the Taliban during the raid on Mullah Omars house..........

[SyedA]

Turning Over a New Leaflet
How to win Afghan hearts and minds.
By Scott Shuger
Posted Monday, November 19, 2001, at 9:29 AM PT


Now that the Taliban and al-Qaida are on the run, the aspect of the U.S. war effort the military calls "psychological operations"—and that you might call propaganda—takes on more importance. That's because the increased prospect of having our troops go up into the mountains to find Mullah Omar, Osama Bin Laden, and their ilk puts more of a premium on locals providing us with helpful information, not giving away our movements, and not actively resisting us. And now that Kabul is accessible, the United States can get its message to many more Afghans via radio and even television. But what should that message be?




The best starting point for an answer is to look at the messages the United States has been using in Afghanistan up till now, via broadcasts from a special radio-studio plane and from air-dropped leaflets. The main themes (sometimes woven together, sometimes not) have been:

1) The Taliban are oppressors and al-Qaida are outsiders who together are destroying the Afghan people.

2) The terrorists prey on the weak and innocent.

3) The Taliban and al-Qaida are bad Muslims who don't even hesitate to kill innocent Muslims.

4) The Taliban are selfish cowards.

5) The Taliban and al-Qaida are facing death at the hands of the United States.

6) The United States is not in Afghanistan to harm innocent people.

7) The United States is not anti-Muslim and is for a free Afghanistan.

These messages touch a lot of important bases. And the broadcasts employing them have liberally used indigenous music, a smart rhetorical move given that music has been banned in Afghanistan for years. Yet the government has missed some important messages and rhetorical moves. There are a number of things the Pentagon's hearts and minds campaign can do differently—and better.

Get a spokesperson. The previously used themes have for the most part been communicated with from-on-high U.S. government rhetoric. A sample: "United States forces have come to stop Osama Bin Laden and to shut down the terrorist camps once and for all. United States forces are here to strike back at the Taliban and at the rest of Bin Laden's fighters. It is the United States' right as a nation to seek justice for those killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center." This is probably a mistake on two counts: 1) It invites Afghans to think of the campaign against terrorism as a U.S. project of little concern to other peoples and nations; and 2) it is impersonal and passionless and, hence, not particularly compelling. Saying that our messages come from "the partnership of nations," as many of them do, avoids the first problem but not the second. A clear way to avoid both traps would be to have an actual, identifiable human being delivering most of our messages. After all, the best advertising campaigns have spokespersons. The administration's recent deployment of American diplomat Christopher Ross, who in his fluent Arabic responded within hours on the Al Jazeera TV network to a Bin Laden video, was on the right track. But to really reach the intended audience—and without the fatal whiff of condescension—the spokesperson should probably be a Muslim. Extra points if he's already widely known and admired. James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, recently made a very good nomination for this role—Muhammad Ali. If Ali's physical deterioration rules out an effective video appearance, he could still be extremely valuable in printed material.

Show as well as tell. And from here on out, the idea war in Afghanistan should be using more pictures. A recent, very informative Wall Street Journal story on the Army's psychological warfare operation reported that the United States balked at using pictures of Ground Zero in its leaflet materials, mainly on the grounds that most Afghans (who haven't seen video of the attack) would have no idea what they were looking at. Fair enough, but how about pictures of the people caught up in the horrors of Sept. 11? Pictures of those who were killed, perhaps (as has been urged recently by James Zogby and former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke) with a special emphasis on Muslim and Arab victims, and pictures of the children and spouses left behind, including shots of them grieving at funerals and memorial services. Afghans need to see the war's human face.

And some of our materials point out that far from hating Muslims, the United States protects their right to worship as they please. Well, how about including pictures of American Muslims worshiping and some wider-angle shots showing them coming and going from their mosques located on identifiably American streets?

Include modern advertising techniques. According to the Journal article, the messages delivered thus far by the U.S. military were ginned up very quickly by only a handful of people, without the benefit of any organized research. So the State Department's decision to call in longtime advertising executive Charlotte Beers to head up its public opinion effort made a lot of sense. (And the press's instant snarkiness about her appointment did not.)

But there's more along these lines that can be done. Now that Afghanistan has opened up quite a bit, the military should hone its psychological campaign by immediately beginning focus group research among in-country Afghans. And we should really listen to that research even if other factors would pull our messages for Afghanistan in another direction. For instance, even if emphasizing women's rights in Afghanistan is dictated by domestic U.S. political pressures (such a campaign would help strengthen support for the war among American women) and office politics (some of the top administration people supervising the hearts and minds campaign are women), the message shouldn't be adopted right now unless it tests positively among representative Afghans.

Make fewer threats. Theme No. 5 from the preceding list is the message we aimed primarily at the Taliban and al-Qaida. Such directly threatening messages (sample: "Our forces are armed with state of the art military equipment. What are you using, obsolete and ineffective weaponry? Our helicopters will rain fire down upon your camps before you detect them on your radar. Our bombs are so accurate we can drop them right through your windows.") have a point, because if you can demoralize an enemy or induce him to surrender, you are saving lives on both sides. And indeed, this technique was fabulously successful at producing mass bloodless surrenders in the Gulf War when it was directed against the poorly trained, starving conscripts in the Iraqi front lines. But the United States should employ such harsh messages very narrowly, because they could provoke higher levels of anti-U.S. hostility among Afghans who are initially more or less on the fence. That is, like a bombing campaign or a political or commercial ad campaign, our message should be targeted, not indiscriminate. So, given the current situation on the ground, we really shouldn't be using such threatening messages much anymore except in the few remaining Taliban/al-Qaida strongholds.

Report the news. Note that nearly all the foregoing themes are, in the vocabulary of American political advertising, wholly negative. Note also that most of them should be pretty obvious to the average Afghan. In other words, the list is short on positive themes that would constitute real information for most people in Afghanistan. Historian Alfred Paddock, who has held key psychological warfare positions in the U.S. Army, says that some of the most effective leafleting done in World War II provided civilians in war-torn areas with simple but accurate news accounts of what was happening around them. So let's start a similar effort in Afghanistan immediately, which would include the latest information about areas that are free from fighting and have food and water When people have been consistently lied to, the most effective propaganda is the truth.

Talk about tomorrow. Almost all the material used thus far is backward-looking. "If you just tell people about a problem," says Scott Burns, one of the creators of the "Got Milk" campaign, "that's not good, especially when they're already aware of it. What you want to do is give them some alternative. Are we telling them that we are going to liberate them soon and that when we do what their world will be like?" We should, says Salam al-Marayati, director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, contrast the hopelessness of an Afghanistan allied with Bin Laden with the hopefulness of the country once it has shed him.

John Zogby, whose opinion research firm, Zogby International, has done polling in much of the Muslim world (but not, he admits, in Afghanistan) has a suggestion for a theme that would make that promise more credible: "We know where you're coming from because we had to liberate ourselves once too."

[Sultan]

The US is deploying extra troops to the region however the number of troops is nothing substantial - 1500 Marines. Which suggests that these troops would be used to support the US Special operatives active in Afghanistan in the hunt for OBL.



http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20011120/ts/attacks_military.html

[H Khan]

By EDITH M. LEDERER
.c The Associated Press


UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Tahmeena Faryal, her face hidden, said the Taliban and the northern alliance ``have outdone each other'' in carrying out massacres and violating women's rights in Afghanistan.

Faryal, who fled Afghanistan after the December 1979 Soviet invasion and became a human rights activist as a refugee in Pakistan, spoke at a U.N. panel.

She warned that a return to power for the northern alliance would return the country to civil war. The alliance has swept the Taliban from power, moving out of the north of the country under the cover of U.S. bombing.

``Both the Taliban and the northern alliance have outdone each other in all kinds of hair-raising massacres and violations of human rights and women's rights,'' she said.

She said the northern alliance, which ruled Afghanistan from 1992-96 until driven out by the Taliban, decreed that all women be veiled.

During their rule, ``hundreds of young girls preferred to commit suicide than be raped or forcibly married'' to alliance men, Faryal said.

Now, she said, the northern alliance ``poses as advocates of women's rights.''

Under Taliban rule, women had to be veiled from head to toe, and could not work or go to school.

Faryal spoke at a U.N. panel discussion as the representative of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, founded in 1977.

The U.N. top envoy for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, announced Tuesday that representatives of Afghan groupings, including the northern alliance, will meet Monday in Berlin, intending to quickly form a transitional government.

[H Khan]

.c Kyodo News Service


SYDNEY, Nov. 21 (Kyodo) - Prime Minister John Howard said Wednesday that Australia has deployed about 30 Special Air Service (SAS) troops to serve in Afghanistan.

Howard said the soldiers left Perth for the Persian Gulf early Wednesday. He said another 120 SAS troops will be sent to the Gulf in about a week.

He declined to provide details on the specifics of their mission.

''They will be based initially in the Gulf region. I don't want to be more specific at this time as to where. This of course is a special force commitment that could be involved in stages of the operation, involved in direct action against some of the hard-core terrorist groups, the pursuit and capture of which is the prime goal of the coalition operation in Afghanistan,'' he said.

Howard said the war on Afghanistan was progressing well for the United States.

''The prime objective is still the pursuit of (Osama) bin Laden and al-Qaida, their apprehension and destruction or bringing to account and that still remains an unrealized objective.

''It shouldn't be assumed that because the military operations are going extremely well for the Americans that the need for special force presence, not only from Australia, but also from most particularly the United States and others is still there,'' he said.

The U.S. claims bin Laden and his al-Qaida network were behind the hijack attacks on the U.S. on Sept. 11.

Howard announced in October Australia would commit 1,550 troops to the war, 150 from the SAS. He also pledged four fighter aircraft, three frigates and two refueling aircraft.

AP-NY-11-20-01 2023EST

[SyedA]

Out ran US in this regard...lets see what happens



Iran opens mission

TEHRAN, Nov 20: Iran reopened its embassy in Kabul on Tuesday, state radio reported, quoting the foreign ministry.

"Considering the latest developments in Afghanistan, Iran's embassy in Kabul has taken up its activities," ministry spokesman Hamid-Reza Asefi said.

The reopening of the embassy, closed when Kabul fell to the Taliban in 1996, came just one day after Iran reopened its consulate in the western Afghan city of Herat.

"The consulate in Herat has taken up its activities in Herat again," Mohammad Alavizadeh, head of the consulate, told the radio on Monday.

Iran recalled its diplomats and closed the consulate in Herat in May after protesters attacked the mission following a bomb blast outside a mosque.

Tehran never recognized the Taliban and the Herat consulate was its only official link with the militia. Iranian foreign ministry officials have reportedly been making their way by road into Afghanistan to also prepare for the reopening of their consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif.-AFP

[Amad Rana]

War On Terror - False Victory
By John Pilger
The Mirror - London
11-20-1

There is no victory in Afghanistan's tribal war, only the exchange of one group of killers for another. The difference is that President Bush calls the latest occupiers of Kabul "our friends".

However, welcome the scenes of people playing music and shaving off their beards, the so-called Northern Alliance are no bringers of freedom. They are the same people welcomed by similar scenes of jubilation in 1992, who then killed an estimated 50,000 in four years of internecine feuding. The new heroes so far have tortured and executed at least 100 prisoners of war, and countless others, as well as looted food supplies and re-established their monopoly on the heroin trade.

This week, Amnesty International made an unusually blunt statement that was buried in the news. It ought to be emblazoned across every front page and television screen. "By failing to appreciate the gravity of the human rights concerns in relation to Northern Alliance leaders," said Amnesty, "UK ministers at best perpetuate a culture of impunity for past crimes; at worst they risk being complicit in human rights abuse." The truth is that the latest crop of criminals to "liberate" Kabul have been given a second chance by the most powerful country on earth pounding into dust one of the poorest, where people's life expectancy is just over 40.

And for what?

Not a single terrorist implicated in the attacks on America has yet to be caught or killed. And Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, where Islamic extremism and its military network took root? Of course not. The Saudi sheikhs, many of them as extreme as the Taliban, control America's greatest source of oil. The Egyptian regime, bribed with billions of US dollars, is an important American proxy. No daisy cutters for them.

There was, and still is, no "war on terrorism". Instead, we have watched a variation of the great imperial game of swapping "bad" terrorists for "good" terrorists, while untold numbers of innocent people have paid with their lives: most of one village, whole families, a hospital, as well as teenage conscripts suitably dehumanised by the word "Taliban".

It is perfectly understandable that those in the West who supported this latest American terror from the air, or hedged their bets, should now seek to cover the blood on their reputations with absurd claims that "bombing works". Tell that to grieving parents at fresh graves in impoverished places of whom the sofa bomb-aimers know nothing.

The contortion of intellect and morality that this triumphalism requires is not a new phenomenon. Putting aside the terminally naive, it mostly comes from those who like to play at war: who have seen nothing of bombing, as I have experienced it: cluster bombs, daisy cutters: the lot. How appropriate that the last American missile to hit Kabul before the "liberators" arrived should destroy the satellite transmitter of the Al-Jazeera television station, virtually the only reliable source of news in the region.

For weeks, American officials have been pressuring the government of Qatar, the Gulf state where Al-Jazeera is based, to silence its broadcasters, who have given a view of the "war against terrorism" other than that based on the false premises of the Bush and Blair "crusade". The guilty secret is that the attack on Afghanistan was unnecessary. The "smoking gun" of this entire episode is evidence of the British Government's lies about the basis for the war. According to Tony Blair, it was impossible to secure Osama bin Laden's extradition from Afghanistan by means other than bombing. Yet in late September and early October, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamic parties negotiated bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for the September 11 attacks. The deal was that he would be held under house arrest in Peshawar. According to reports in Pakistan (and the Daily Telegraph), this had both bin Laden's approval and that of Mullah Omah, the Taliban leader.

The offer was that he would face an international tribunal, which would decide whether to try him or hand him over to America. Either way, he would have been out of Afghanistan, and a tentative justice would be seen to be in progress. It was vetoed by Pakistan's president Musharraf who said he "could not guarantee bin Laden's safety".

But who really killed the deal?

The US Ambassador to Pakistan was notified in advance of the proposal and the mission to put it to the Taliban. Later, a US official said that "casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of the international effort if by some luck chance Mr bin Laden was captured". And yet the US and British governments insisted there was no alternative to bombing Afghanistan because the Taliban had "refused" to hand over Osama bin Laden. What the Afghani people got instead was "American justice" - imposed by a president who, as well as denouncing international agreements on nuclear weapons, biological weapons, torture, and global warming, has refused to sign up for an international court to try war criminals: the one place where bin Laden might be put on trial.

When Tony Blair said this war was not an attack on Islam as such, he was correct. Its aim, in the short term, was to satisfy a domestic audience then to accelerate American influence in a vital region where there has been a power vacuum since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of China, whose oil needs are expected eventually to surpass even those of the US. That is why control of Central Asia and the Caspian basin oilfields is important as exploration gets under way.

There was, until the cluster bombing of innocents, a broad-based recognition that there had to be international action to combat the kind of terrorism that took thousands of lives in New York. But these humane responses to September 11 were appropriated by an American administration, whose subsequent actions ought to have left all but the complicit and the politically blind in no doubt that it intended to reinforce its post-cold war assertion of global supremacy - an assertion that has a long, documented history.

The "war on terrorism" gave Bush the pretext to pressure Congress into pushing through laws that erode much of the basis of American justice and democracy. Blair has followed behind with anti-terrorism laws of the very kind that failed to catch a single terrorist during the Irish war

In this atmosphere of draconian controls and fear, in the US and Britain, mere explanation of the root causes of the attacks on America invites ludicrous accusations of "treachery." Above all, what this false victory has demonstrated is that, to those in power in Washington and London and those who speak for them, certain human lives have greater worth than others and that the killing of only one set of civilians is a crime. If we accept that, we beckon the repetition of atrocities on all sides, again and again..

[Mark Bannister]

'Strategic Debacle' Leaves Islamabad With Little Influence Over Afghanistan

Link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61144-2001Nov20.html

[Amad Rana]

Leaves Islamabad With Little Influence I just watched live press conference by taliban spokesperson syed tayyad ,he was talking about the withdraw from Kabul and jalalabad,according to him only few talibans were actually killed ,not by northern aliens but by US bombing .and most of talibans are safe in their strong hold of khandahar ,and other pushtun areas .quite contradictory to the news about imminent fall of khandhar.so this washeverythingundertherug.post report as always, surly written by a living room writer with a redneck background who probably never traveled outside of his county.:D so Pakistan has lost influence in northern aliens held areas sure, but pushtune areas are different ball game who BTW form 60% of afghan populous.and always were in power and will remain so,talibans or no talibans .

[Gaf]

Amad Rana,

What about the possible massacre in Kunduz ??? We all know that will happen soon and that will result in the loss of many soldiers.

Its true, that Pakistan has some influence left with the Pashtuns, what you have to consider is that the Taliban have lost most of the small/medium and heavy artillery. This is in addition to all of their tanks being destroyed and the loss of their (albeit small!) airforce. Given that there are international laws prohibiting the supply of arms to the Taliban, I don't see the Taliban ever being able to recover from this, least of all, challenge the N.A.

[SyedA]

British Foreign Secretary to visit Iran, Pakistan
(Updated at 1800 PST)
LONDON: British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw announced Wednesday that he was to visit Iran and Pakistan as part of international efforts to help set up a broad-based government in war torn Afghanistan.

Straw was to leave on Wednesday evening on his mission to urge the nations' leaders to bring pressure on the different tribal, ethnic and political groups vying for control of neighbouring Afghanistan.

[Sultan]

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20011121/wl/afghanistan_security_4.html

[Sultan]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,602918,00.html

[H Khan]

By Michael Christie


QUETTA, Pakistan, Nov 21 (Reuters) - Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazaras -- it's time Afghanistan's divisive ethnic kaleidoscope was laid to rest, say leaders from the southern Pashtun tribes.

The leaders on Wednesday said they embraced a U.N.-sponsored peace conference, due to take place in Germany, and insisted Afghanistan's largest tribe, Pashtuns, would be adequately represented no matter who went along.

"We are all Afghans," said Hamid Achakzai, brother of Mahmood Khan, leader of the Pashtun Achakzai clan.

"I think Afghans have now got a good spirit and are ready for peace," Achakzai said by telephone from Gulistan, the family's home village on the Afghan-Pakistan frontier.

Pashtun leaders said an agreement between the United Nations and the Northern Alliance to hold talks among Afghan opposition leaders early next week was the first step to achieving what they all want -- a Loya Jirga, or grand assembly of tribal chiefs.

Following the Northern Alliance's lightning advance against the fundamentalist Taliban after more than 40 days of U.S. bombing, the meeting would help bring northern and southern Afghans together, tribal leaders said.

Concerns that the conference would be dominated by the Uzbek and Tajik minorities of the Northern Alliance, and that Pashtuns, who comprise around 40 percent of Afghanistan's 20 million people, would be under-represented, were being overplayed, they said.

"The media is making a big deal of this. But everyone is Afghan," said Shawali Karzai, a brother of Popalzai nobleman Hamid Karzai.

EX-KING SPEAKS FOR MANY

Pashtun opposition figures from south Afghanistan say their views will be presented at the Berlin meeting by envoys of deposed Afghan monarch Zahir Shah, in exile in Rome.

They also note that the Northern Alliance includes some Pashtuns, as do the factions that drove the Taliban out of the eastern city of Jalalabad.

At the end of the day, tribal experts say, the Pashtuns are so diverse that identifying them as a separate political group might make little sense.

"Who should represent the Pashtuns? That's like asking who represents England," said Sher Bahadur, a retired Pakistani geologist who negotiated survey rights with frontier tribes for foreign mining firms.

The one group that will not be heard are the Taliban, who have been pummelled back to their southern stronghold of Kandahar and a pocket in the north.

Hamid Karzai, who has been inside central Afghanistan wooing warlords away from the Taliban since the U.S. air strikes began on October 7, told Reuters he would like to attend the U.N. conference.

But it could be difficult to reach Berlin in time from his location in the south of Uruzgan province.

A nephew of opposition leader Abdul Khaliq, a member of the influential Noorsai tribe, said Khaliq would also like to take part.

But again, he felt adequately represented by other supporters of a Loya Jirga, which will determine the make-up of a broad-based post-Taliban government.

Pakistan is perhaps among the most concerned about Pashtun representation at the conference.

The conservative tribal customs of Pakistan's frontier Pashtun tribes mirror some aspects of the Taliban's purist vision of Islam, and Pakistan played a large role in fueling the Taliban's sweep across Afghanistan in the 1990s.

Affirmations of national harmony spill easily from the lips of Afghan leaders after 23 years of war.

But it is not just the media that have focused on possible divisions between Pashtuns and the Northern Alliance.

"The leader of the Afghan nation must be a strong leader. He must be religious. And he must be Pashtun," Nasrullah Khan Kakar, of the three million-strong Kakar border tribe, told Reuters recently.

08:20 11-21-01

[faraz]

New beginning in Iran, Pakistan ties

By Susannah Price in Islamabad

The expulsion of the Taleban from Kabul has signalled a new beginning in relations between two of Afghanistan's neighbours: Iran and Pakistan.

The government in Islamabad was the Taleban's strongest supporter and the movement had its roots in the refugee camps and religious schools in Pakistan.

The Taleban were drawn from the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan; the Pashtuns, who are also found in Pakistan.

Iran's concerns

During the Taleban's rule, Iran's main concern was the plight of the minority Hazaras, who are Shi-ite, like most Iranians, and who were persecuted.

Iran backed their party which was in the Northern Alliance.

When the Taleban took over the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, they killed several Iranian diplomats.

Iran appeared prepared to go to war.

Emerging ties

The sudden fall of the Taleban has left both Pakistan and Iran joined in enthusiastic support of the idea of a new broad based government.

The Pakistan President, Pervez Musharraf, stopped off briefly in Iran on his way to the UN General Assembly in New York.

Gen Musharraf met the Iranian President, Mohammad Khatami, on the sidelines of the gathering.

The Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister, Mohsin Ainzadeh, came to Islamabad for talks and another minister is due to follow shortly.

Iran and Pakistan both mistrust Russia, which backs the Northern Alliance and appears ready to recognise it as the government.

[Amad Rana]

Gaffar(assumption),if you go by the western media every thing is honkey dory :D,its a big fraud they are showing to average American people,using their patriotic sentiments and using the unfortunate events of Sep-11 ,for Islam bashing and who are behind all of this ,we all know that but add Hindus too now ,notice how Hindus now hold most of CNN coverage from Afghanistan,e.g sitinder bindra and other Hindu monkeys working behind the scene .but its not easy to kill and destroy 60% of pashtunes and their cities ,I think talibans can capture all most every areas lost to northern aliens gypsies with in same time period ,in my opinion they just did a strategic withdrawal and trying to negotiate OBL hand over to some neutral country.cheerz.and here what they got :D:D:D

[Mark Bannister]

Rival Afghan Factions Fight West of Kabul

REUTERS - November 22, 2001 10:06 AM ET

By Sayed Salahuddin

MAIDAN SHAHR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Fighting between rival Afghan groups raged near Kabul on Thursday, as old political rifts reopened.

The fighting appeared to involve the mainly Tajik and Uzbek Northern Alliance, their Shi'ite allies, a hardline Sunni warlord and the Taliban -- but it was unclear on which side each was fighting.

All involved in the complicated battle denied switching sides and insisted that others were involved in the fighting, which revived memories of the bitter 1992-96 civil war that killed 50,000 Kabul residents. Around 1,500 Northern Alliance troops fired rockets, mortars and artillery at Taliban positions near the dusty township of Maidan Shahr some 20 miles west of Kabul, witnesses said.

Northern Alliance commanders and local residents said that further to the west of Maidan Shahr, Hazara fighters who had been battling the Taliban had now switched sides.

The Hazaras, a Shi'ite Muslim minority said to be descended from the soldiers of Ghengis Khan, have been loosely affiliated to the Northern Alliance and have been victims of Taliban massacres in the past.

The leader of the Hazara Hezb-i-Wahdat faction, Karim Khalili, swiftly dismissed suggestions of a renewed bout of ethnic conflict.

The battles involved forces loyal to hardline fundamentalist Sunni mujahideen commander Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf ranged against former Taliban and now Northern Alliance commander Ustad Golam Mohammad, Khalili said.

He said no Hezb-i-Wadat fighters were positioned near Maidan Shahr.

"We have tried to stop this fighting. We have sent messages to (ousted President Burhanuddin) Rabbani, Sayyaf, Ustad Golam Mohammad and (Interior Minister) Yunus Qanuni to try to stop the fighting," Khalili told Reuters.

The clashes cut the main road linking north and south Afghanistan.

"No traffic has gone through because of the fighting," said Northern Alliance fighter Shah Mohammad.

The Alliance had been seeking to persuade the Taliban to surrender Maidan Shahr since it captured Kabul, the capital, on November 13.

Witnesses said Pakistani and Arab fighters linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network were among the Taliban ranks.

Northern Alliance commanders said they planned to ask for U.S. air strikes to help them dislodge the Taliban.

"We will ask the Americans to pound Taliban positions," Alliance commander Sher Alam told Reuters.

:D

[H Khan]

.c The Associated Press


ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) - The Taliban lost their last diplomatic contact with the outside world Thursday when Pakistan informed the staff of the Afghan Embassy in Islamabad - controlled by the Taliban - that it should shut down.

Diplomats came to their offices early in the morning, but left after a few minutes, embassy official Mufti Yousuf said.

``We are delighted to know that Pakistan is severing diplomatic relations with the Taliban,'' said Kenton Keith, spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition

AP-NY-11-22-01 1016EST

[H Khan]

GENEVA, Nov 22 (Reuters) - The International Committee of the Red Cross said on Thursday that between 400 and 600 bodies had been found in the northern Afghan town of Mazar-i-Sharif after its capture by the Northern Alliance.

Spokeswoman Macarena Aguilar could not say whether the dead had been executed or killed in fighting that preceded the fall of the town on November 9.

"I know 400 to 600 bodies have been found and that we have so far buried 300," Aguilar told Reuters.

"I cannot say how they died," she added. She could not say from what ethnic group the dead had come.

The fall of Mazar, close to Afghanistan's frontier with Uzbekistan, triggered a whirlwind advance by the Northern Alliance that has seen them capture much of the country.

The Alliance, which once had just 10 percent of Afghanistan, turned the tables on its former rulers, the Taliban, with the help of massive air strikes by the United States.

Washington accused the Muslim fundamentalist regime of harbouring Saudi-born Islamic militant Osama bin Laden, who it blames for the September 11 plane hijackings in which some 4,000 people died in New York and Washington.

The rapid gains by the Alliance have also brought fears of a repeat of the massacres that have been a hallmark of the impoverished country's decade-long civil war.

The ICRC said in a statement that it had also been visiting some of the 240 prisoners officially being held by the Northern Alliance in Mazar.

13:25 11-22-01

[AkramIshaqKhan]

Just watched on CPTV - PBS news that Pakistan has begun air lifgting out of Kunduz. Hope this news is true and correct. If those Pakistanis die in Kunduz it will be a severe blow to our prestige, and honor. Regardless of how misguided those people are they are our citizen and afford our help no matter what. As a nation we must look out for them. That is what great nations are all about.

JK.

[Amad Rana]

and I think most people will held musharsf responsible for their killings in the hands of Northern aliens thugs ,since he did nothing to destroy them when he had a chance and as a matter of fact he offer safe sanctuaries to many of the NA members and their families in Pakistan that too in islamabad , a kind of treachery against the state of Pakistan , he should remember he don't own Pakistan and its people so he should refrain from hurting our prestige in the name of peace. if pictures of these Pakistanis start coming home with bodies laying in streets and being spitted on .then lets face it ,its our war against NA ,no matter what,we have to fight it regardless of our international image and responsibilities .ho but before doing that I will nuke Hinduland and some "other" pests first.

[Mark Bannister]

City of blood and betrayal

FROM IAN COBAIN IN THE SEIGE OF KONDUZ

KONDUZ was on the brink of a bloodbath last night, as rival Northern Alliance warlords vied for the city and the Taleban’s besieged forces threatened to turn on each other.
As one Alliance general attacked from the east, another moved in from the west, while inside the last Taleban stronghold in northern Afghanistan foreign fanatics were preparing to kill Taleban defectors.

The split between rival Alliance commanders determined to seize Konduz has undermined hopes of building a broad-based Afghan government, as another apparently straightforward military situation dissolved into back-stabbing ferocity.

One general claimed to have negotiated a surrender of Taleban fighters while another promised only further bloodshed, as both sought to control the city and its stockpile of Taleban weapons.

In an announcement that is said to have triggered street celebrations in the besieged city, the Uzbek General Rashid Dostum claimed to have negotiated a settlement allowing the Islamic militia to lay down arms and surrender.

Less than an hour later, on the opposite side of the city, Tajik General Mohammad Dawood Khan was mobilising his tanks, artillery and thousands of infantry, in an attempt to take it by force.

By last night he appeared to have pushed the Taleban back several miles towards the small town of Khanabad, taking scores of prisoners as they went and accepting the surrender of several hundred deserters who had agreed to switch sides.

It was the first sign of a schism in the fragile, multi-ethnic Alliance, pitting one tribal leader against another. Whichever general wins, the 220,000 inhabitants of Konduz, a city the size of Derby, will be caught in the crossfire. General Dawood’s assault was under way yesterday evening, with his T55s firing shell after shell into the Taleban’s hilltop positions 20 miles east of Konduz, while American B52 bombers soared overhead, dropping 500lb bombs that kicked dust and debris high into the air.

General Dostum’s forces were reported to have entered the western outskirts of the city. The Taleban had appeared to be on the point of surrender, but as the Alliance fractured, the remaining fighters showed little sign of giving up.

“We know there have been talks, and we know the high-ups say it means peace,” Mohammad Shamam said as he struggled across the front line towards the safety of the city of Taloqan in the east, followed by his burka-clad wife and six frowning children, with their worldly possessions on the backs of two donkeys.

“But only a fool would gamble that there will be anything but war.”

As if to echo his cynicism, three Taleban mortar shells screamed over his head and exploded beside the road ahead, sending dozens of refugees scurrying across the rice fields. Two minutes later a fourth shell landed, and then a fifth.

Throughout the day, thousands of General Dawood’s troops moved towards the front, most of them marching dozens of miles on foot, but some making their way on ageing flat-bed lorries and pick-up trucks. Large numbers of T54 and T55 tanks could also be seen travelling west towards the Taleban’s defences, followed by Russian-made armoured fighting vehicles.

Most of the troops were ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks, but among them were 400 Pashtun fighters who had thrown in their lot with the Alliance and agreed to wage war against the Pashtun-led Taleban.

Closer to the front, hundreds of troops sheltered in rice fields, or rested on the roofs of the mud houses. All around them were the scars not just of the last month’s fighting against the Taleban, but of 22 years of war: rusting Soviet tanks lay along the wayside while the fields and hills were pockmarked by ancient shell craters. Much of the area was mined by the Russians, and more mines were laid during fighting against the Taleban in 1997 and again last year: all along the road, one-legged men and boys hobbled out of their homes in dirt-poor villages to watch the advancing army.

Tracer rounds could be seen arcing across the sky and the deafening roar of laser-guided bombs showed that American jets were continuing to seek Taleban targets.

As the people of Konduz waited to discover their fate, so too did the thousands of foreigners fighting alongside the Taleban, many of them Islamic fundamentalists thought to be loyal to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network. The issue of touris khareji, the foreign tourists, has been the major stumbling block during the surrender negotiations although yesterday, in their hunger for the spoils of Konduz, both warlords appeared to have put out of their minds.

There was growing evidence that some foreign Taleban have already slipped the net, with increasing numbers of refugees claiming that Pakistani transport planes have been landing at the city’s airfield, bringing American dollars for the trapped Taleban commanders and evacuating young Pakistani and Punjabi fighters. It was unclear why the United States, which controls the airspace over Afghanistan, would have permitted such flights.

There is also suspicion at General Dawood’s headquarters that General Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek, will have quietly extricated many of the fundamentalist fighters from Uzbekistan, the former Soviet republic, to the north.

Up to 2,000 men from Uzbekistan are thought to have been fighting with the Taleban under the leadership of Juma “Jumaboy” Namangani, a former Red Army paratrooper. He died in an American bombing raid four days ago.

General Dostum’s forces chased thousands of Taleban to Konduz after prising them out of the northern city of Mazar-i Sharif two weeks ago.

The general declared that he had secured the city’s surrender after talks with Mullah Dadi Allah, the senior Taleban commander in Konduz, who is reported to be barely able to control his foreign fighters.

General Dostum, who has changed sides three times during 22 years of war in Afghanistan, appears to have been been anxious not only to take possession of the Taleban’s military assets in Konduz, but also to persuade its fighters to join his own army, and so strengthen his hand in forthcoming talks on the country’s future.

Shortly after General Dostum announced his success, Yunus Qanuni, the Alliance Interior Minister and a close ally of General Dawood, said: “The surrender talks have failed, and now we are forced to choose the military option.”

General Dawood’s forces are arrayed to the east, north and south of Konduz.

His deputy, General Shak Jahan, said that he believed there to be 120 Taleban tanks in Konduz, along with 400 artillery pieces and anti-aircraft guns and more than 1,000 Soviet-built armoured personnel carriers. General Dawood is thought to have just eight serviceable helicopters, while it is unclear whether General Dostum has any.

Remarkably, senior Alliance figures conceded that the real trophy for the eventual conquerer of Konduz will be more prosaic. As winter sets in it will become increasingly difficult to move forces quickly over the mountainous terrain. Both men are now said to be desperate to seize the Taleban’s huge fleet of battered Toyota pick-up trucks.

[osman]

Interesting article in the wash post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3526-2001Nov22.html

[H Khan]

I like how IAN COBAIN used the terms "evacuating young Pakistani and Punjabi fighters"????.....As usual these low life British scums try to twist a splite between the Pakistanis.

[H Khan]

By KATHY GANNON
.c The Associated Press


KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - Wrapped in a dirty brown blanket, his arm in a blood-soaked sling, a deep hole gouged from his shoulder by shrapnel, Zabin says he's not one of Osama bin Laden's men. His captors think otherwise.

Zabin, a Saudi Arabian, and other foreigners have been jailed since Kabul fell to the northern alliance.

Their home now is a basement prison in a military intelligence compound, a collection of filthy, rancid smelling subterranean rooms.

They lay on the floor, huddled beneath dirty woolen blankets, or on ratty steel bunkbeds. They lay crowded seven and eight to a room.

They were from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kyrgyzstan and Indonesia - all warriors for the ousted Taliban regime that preached a strict brand of Islam, said Daulat Mir, deputy head of the jail.

``When we first arrested them, we asked them, 'Which group do you belong to?' They said 'al-Qaida,''' Mir said, referring to bin Laden's terrorist network.

In their sweep across Afghanistan, the northern alliance has captured more than 500 foreigners fighting alongside the Taliban, Mir said. They include about 200 Pakistani militants arrested along the front in Kunduz province, the last northern outpost under Taliban control.

Others were caught in Kabul, Herat and other cities abandoned by the Taliban after Mazar-e-Sharif fell Nov. 9, leading to the wholesale collapse of Taliban control over most of the country.

``First we will interrogate them and then it will be up to the leadership to decide how to proceed,'' Mir said.

In Washington, Pentagon officials said Wednesday that Gen. Tommy Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command, has discussed the treatment of prisoners with northern alliance commanders in Afghanistan.

``Among other things, he emphasized the fact that if there are prisoners, they should be humanely treated,'' said Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

At the military jail, a flight of stairs leads down to a darkened foyer, where guard Mohammed Saqi fumbles with a handful of keys to unlock the large padlock on the gray steel door leading to the underground cells.

Bare light bulbs dangle from wires, illuminating a long, grime-streaked corridor lined with padlocked steel doors. Saqi opens a small window, through which several men can be seen beneath blankets.

Zabin, the Saudi Arabian, wears only a pair of baggy pants. The blanket is pulled back by guards to reveal the bloodied bandage and the gaping hole where he says shrapnel ripped into him while he was at the front north of Kabul.

He can speak only Arabic and a little Dari, one of Afghanistan's languages. He says he's from Qasim in Saudi Arabia.

Zabin shakes his head when asked if he was affiliated with Osama bin Laden, whose al-Qaida network is blamed by Washington for the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the United States.

``He is from Osama. We know that,'' says Mullah Mohammed, the prison security chief.

Grimacing in pain, Zabin won't, or can't, say more. Prison officials say he has been seen by a doctor, who sent him back to the jail.

Two other Saudi prisoners are from Jiddah. Abdullah Mohammed Hamid and Jabbar-ul Hasan say they were employees of the Saudi humanitarian aid organization WAFA.

WAFA was among several groups named by the United States as possible money conduits for bin Laden and his network. Both deny knowing bin Laden.

Hasan was arrested in Karte Parwan, in northern Kabul, near an al-Qaida safe house where documents were found that pointed to study of chemistry and chemical weapons, his jailers say.

Hamid was caught in the Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood of Kabul, a once posh residential area where dozens of foreigners - Arabs, Uzbeks, Chechens and Pakistanis - lived with their families.

Hamid is brought from his cell where he had been lying curled up beneath a bunk bed. He tries to hide his face when his jailer opens the door. Speaking only Arabic, he is reluctant to talk, but does insist he doesn't know anything about bin Laden.

AP-NY-11-23-01 1131EST

[H Khan]

By Sayed Salahuddin and Olga Petrova


KABUL/BANGI (Reuters) - U.S. warplanes bombarded Taliban fighters trapped in Kunduz Friday as suspicions grew of a split in the multi-ethnic alliance besieging the radical militia's last northern bastion.

A Reuters television crew near Taloqan, east of Kunduz, saw American B-52s flying overhead and then heard the sound of bombs exploding in the direction of the city, sending plumes of smoke high into the sky.

The bombing came on the 48th day of aerial punishment of the Taliban for harboring Saudi-born fugitive Osama bin Laden, suspected of masterminding hijacked-airliner attacks on the United States on Sept. 11 that killed nearly 4,000 people.

And in a sign of mounting pressure in the south, a Taliban official said their supreme leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, had fled his stronghold in the city of Kandahar for a more secure hideaway, leaving a deputy in his place.

"Mullah Omar has shifted to an unknown place for security reasons," Mullah Sayed Mohammad Haqqani, a Taliban security official in charge at the border town of Spin Boldak near Pakistan, told Reuters.

In what would be a potentially damaging split, the Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) quoted a Taliban spokesman as saying two of the main wings of the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance were at loggerheads over plans for the surrender of Kunduz.

The spokesman said terms agreed Thursday by ethnic Uzbek warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum had upset ousted President Burhanuddin Rabbani, a Tajik who nominally heads the Alliance.

As a result, he told AIP, forces loyal to Rabbani had launched an assault on Kunduz, an ancient city astride strategic supply routes into Tajikistan.

But Reuters reporters saw few obvious signs of fighting on the eastern side of Kunduz Friday.

"As a result of yesterday's offensives we have captured three villages and about 300 Taliban soldiers surrendered. Today is quiet and we're waiting for further orders," local commander Abdul Zahid said.

FEARS OF BLOODBATH

The reported rift could explain conflicting comments over the past days from the Northern Alliance leadership about their plans for Kunduz, where some 15,000 Afghan Taliban and foreign fighters loyal to Saudi-born fugitive Osama bin Laden are pinned down.

Factional infighting is the one political constant in Afghanistan, where alliances among its kaleidoscope of ethnic, tribal and religious groups are in perpetual motion.

Dostum himself has shifted sides down the years more often than most people move house. A militia leader with a reputation

for brutality and lavish living, he also staged an unsuccessful revolt against then President Rabbani in 1994.

Fears grew Friday that Kunduz could be a bloodbath if the surrender talks founder or if thousands of Pakistani, Arab and Chechen fighters linked to bin Laden's al Qaeda network fight to the death rather than face the risk of summary justice.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf expressed serious concern at a meeting in Islamabad about the fate of the Kunduz defenders.

"We're working hard to see if it's possible to avoid a massacre," Straw told reporters on his aircraft as he flew back to London. "It means getting a much clearer assessment of the situation and finding out if it is possible to get a surrender."

RED CROSS WORRIES

Foreign fighters' fears of retribution will not have been allayed by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which said up to 600 bodies had been found in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif after its capture two weeks ago by the Alliance.

"Yes, we've been talking to both the Northern Alliance and the (U.S.-led) coalition about our concerns over Kunduz," ICRC spokesman Bernard Barrett told Reuters.

"There have been stories of executions and that would be a concern too because summary executions are clearly prohibited under the Geneva convention."

The chief target for the U.S.-led coalition is not Kunduz but Kandahar, where the bulk of the Taliban's forces are massed after their swift rout by the Northern Alliance from most of the rest of the country, including the capital, Kabul.

The Taliban security official said the decision to appoint Omar's deputy as acting chief was taken at a meeting of Taliban leaders Thursday in Kandahar, the movement's spiritual home, which they say they have a religious compulsion to defend.

But the private Pakistan-based AIP later quoted Omar's spokesman as saying the report was false. "He is still in Kandahar and still has contact with his fighters," spokesman Tayab Agha was quoted as telling AIP by telephone.

Using the latest spying and thermal imaging equipment, special U.S. forces on the ground and reconnaissance aircraft are combing the hills and mountains of southern Afghanistan for bin Laden.

Other unmanned aircraft are firing missiles at caves and tunnels where the millionaire militant might be holed up.

Washington is hoping a different weapon in its arsenal will hit the target: it has offered rewards of up to $25 million for information leading to bin Laden and his top lieutenants.

KANDAHAR IN THEIR SIGHTS

As pressure mounts on the Taliban, about 700 followers of two anti-Taliban Pashtun leaders have assembled inside Afghanistan preparing for what they called an assault on Kandahar soon.

Local residents said they saw helicopters, possibly American, supplying arms and warm clothing to the fighters, who were lodged in about 60-70 tents.

On the diplomatic front, Straw said he saw a real chance of a post-Taliban government of national unity eventually emerging from U.N.-backed political talks starting in Germany next Monday.

But he said it would be a daunting task to forge from Afghanistan's factional chaos a broad-based, multi-ethnic administration able to run a devastated country that has been at war for more than 20 years.

"We have to bear in mind the United Nations is trying to build the foundation of a stable government from nothing, from a failed state," Straw said.

(Additional reporting by Saeed Ali Achakzai in Chaman; Michael Steen in Kabul; Nikolai Pavlov in Mazar-i-Sharif; and Zeeshan Haider and Dominic Evans in Islamabad)

11:11 11-23-01

[H Khan]

EU to Host Afghanistan Donor Meeting

.c The Associated Press


BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) - The first of a series of international donor meetings to plan the recovery and rebuilding of Afghanistan will be held next month, European Union officials said Friday.

The United States, Japan, Saudi Arabia* and the 15-nation EU will act as co-chairs of the meeting Dec. 17-18 in Brussels, said EU spokesman Gunnar Wiegand.

Participants - government officials and nongovernment organizations groups - will assess Afghanistan's needs and discuss how the recovery effort would be funded, Wiegand said.

``It will be necessary to have an urgent first need assessment done,'' he told reporters. He said he expects ``many countries and many organizations'' to take part in the meeting. A second meeting will be held in late January in Japan.

Afghanistan's recovery effort is being coordinated by the United Nations, which has suggested a five-year plan. Wiegand said the plan would focus primarily on ensuring a stable food supply in the wake of prolonged conflict and continuing drought.

Other priorities include de-mining, rebuilding roads, restoring water and electricity, providing seeds to farmers, repairing infrastructure in cities and rebuilding national institutions, he said.

The EU's Development Commissioner, Poul Nielson, is expected to visit Kabul early next month to assess the humanitarian situation. The EU has sent an aid-assessment team to Pakistan and will set up a permanent office in Kabul in the weeks ahead, officials said.

The EU has said that it was ready to participate fully in any reconstruction effort, suggesting it would increase the $268 million it has already pledged in humanitarian aid.




*Ever notice that Saudi Arabia's name is always there when Aghanistan's name is used in international level.

[H Khan]

By AMIR ZIA
.c The Associated Press


ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) - British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Friday the situation in the besieged northern Afghan city of Kunduz was grave, and those Taliban and al-Qaida fighters who want to surrender should not be mistreated.

``Our position is very straightforward: that is that if people are ready to surrender ... then the surrender should be accepted,'' Straw told reporters after meeting with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar.

``We all understand the potential humanitarian disaster that is possible in Kunduz,'' Straw added.

Straw arrived in Islamabad late Thursday from Iran on the second leg of a diplomatic mission to promote a broad-based government in Afghanistan. He also met the U.N. envoy to Afghanistan, Francesc Vendrell.

Thousands of Taliban fighters and their Pakistani, Arab and Chechen allies are stranded in Kunduz which is under siege by the northern alliance. Many of the foreigners are believed part of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.

The Taliban and the northern alliance have reached agreement on a plan to allow the Afghan fighters to leave the city, but the foreigners will be detained. Talks were underway Friday in Mazar-e-Sharif to finalize the deal.

Many of the foreign fighters are believed to be Pakistanis, and this country's religious parties are demanding the government do all it can to save the lives of Pakistani nationals.

Pakistan is a key ally of the U.S.-led coalition, which launched military operations in Afghanistan on Oct. 7 after the Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden, the key suspect of Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

During his talks with Musharraf and others, Straw also discussed an upcoming conference of Afghan factions in Bonn, Germany, aimed at paving the way for a new government in Afghanistan.

Straw said he hopes the process can be completed as soon as possible.

Sattar said Pakistan hopes that in subsequent meetings, those Afghan factions which will not attend the Bonn conference can be included. He did not elaborate.

After his meeting with Straw, Vendrell said that the meeting in Germany would be a good start for peace.

``I don't think we should have too high expectations that they are going to meet and immediately agree to the kind of plan that we have put forward in the Security Council,'' Vendrell told reporters. ``But if we can make progress on it, there could be some understandings which could be later translated into agreements.''

AP-NY-11-23-01 0719EST

[H Khan]

Taliban cling to Kunduz; signs of opposition rift

By Olga Petrova and Christopher Wilson


BANGI, Afghanistan/WASHINGTON, Nov 23 (Reuters) - Afghanistan's embattled Taliban on Friday weathered fierce U.S. bombing raids on their besieged northern city of Kunduz, and the Northern Alliance showed signs of a rift, issuing contradictory reports about attempts to negotiate a surrender.

U.S. B-52 bombers again pounded Kunduz, where an estimated 15,000 Taliban soldiers and foreigners loyal to Saudi-born fugitive Osama bin Laden were holed up after surrender talks collapsed. Bin Laden is the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

There was little evidence the Alliance had carried out a promised large-scale assault on the city, which has been encircled by its forces for more than a week.

There were reports of a split between rival ethnic factions within the Alliance, while some local surrender talks resumed.

A Taliban spokesman said the Taliban had reached surrender terms on Thursday with warlord Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek besieging the west of Kunduz, but that forces loyal to ousted President Burhanuddin Rabbani, an ethnic Tajik, were not content and launched several attacks on Thursday.

East of Kunduz, a Reuters camera team near Taloqan saw B-52s fly overhead and heard bombing as plumes of smoke rose from the city. There was some firing but little sign of the three-pronged ground assault threatened by the Alliance.

Northern Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah told Reuters he hoped negotiations with the fighters in Kunduz would work, but the attack would go ahead if they failed.

"We have given them more time, until tomorrow afternoon. Otherwise if there isn't a result after these negotiations, the fighting will resume," he said.

Mystery surrounded the whereabouts of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, who was first said to have left the radical Islamic militia's southern stronghold of Kandahar, but was later reported to be still in the city.

In Spin Boldak near the Pakistani border, Taliban official Mullah Sayed Haqqani said Mullah Omar had left the city, leaving his deputy in charge.

But the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) quoted Mullah Omar's spokesman, Tayab Agha, as saying, "He is still in Kandahar and still has contact with his fighters."

"REIGN OF TERROR" IN KANDAHAR

The Washington Post reported on Friday that Taliban zealots and their Arab partners from bin Laden's al Qaeda network were determined to fight to the finish in Kandahar and had detained the wives and children of hundreds of Afghan fighters to prevent them from surrendering or fleeing the city.

The newspaper, reporting from Karachi, Pakistan, quoted three disillusioned Pakistani militants who escaped from Kandahar after joining the Taliban as saying loyalists to Mullah Omar were carrying out a "reign of terror" inside the city.

The Pakistanis told the Post the women and children were confined to guarded compounds and were told they would not see the male members of their families until America was defeated.

"Mullah Omar lieutenants and Arabs have told these Taliban that they would only be allowed to meet their wives and children once the war is over," Pakistani Rasheed Ahmed was quoted as saying. "Jihad doesn't allow us to force Muslims to fight by holding their families as hostages."

Most of the Taliban's remaining forces are massed in Kandahar, the Taliban's so-called spiritual home.

Mullah Bismillah, a former commander who recently fled the city for Pakistan, said Taliban troops might have 500 tanks and would defend the city to their last breath.

Mullah Bismillah escaped from Kandahar in early November because of heavy U.S. bombing and because he did not believe in sacrificing his life for bin Laden.

Kunduz and Kandahar are the only two major Afghan cities still in the hands of the Taliban, whose rule of the country has crumbled under relentless U.S. bombing raids and spectacular battlefield gains by the Northern Alliance.

Helped by U.S air raids to punish the Taliban for harboring bin Laden, the Alliance now controls most of the country. Yet it remains not only internally divided but also far from representative of Afghanistan as a whole.

As diplomats prepared the ground for a conference next week of rival Afghan factions -- excluding the Taliban -- in Bonn, Germany, Pakistan asked for more groups to be invited from the Pashtun majority, which was the Taliban's power base.

Pakistan is nervous that a post-Taliban settlement will marginalize the ethnic Pashtuns, who make up about 40 percent of Afghanistan's population and about 15 percent of Pakistan's, benefiting other groups backed by Russia, Iran and India.

REPORTS OF DOZENS KILLED IN KUNDUZ

AIP quoted a Taliban spokesman in Kunduz as saying dozens had been killed or wounded by U.S. bombs in the eastern and northeastern parts of the city.

Kunduz guards routes into the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan to the north. It and Mazar-i-Sharif, which controls access to Uzbekistan and is held by Dostum, are the twin keys to control of the north of the country.

The sticking point in negotiations for the surrender of Kunduz appears to be the fate of perhaps 10,000 Arabs, Pakistanis and Chechens, loathed by locals, who are fighting beside the Afghan Taliban and are linked to al Qaeda.

The discovery of up to 600 bodies in Mazar-i-Sharif, taken by Dostum two weeks ago, and Washington's determination that the defenders of Kunduz should not escape have fueled fears of a massacre if the Alliance captures Kunduz.

Northern Alliance commanders say the foreign fighters have executed hundreds of Afghans who wanted to surrender.

With no coherent power structure in place in Afghanistan, the United Nations said the security situation was still too uncertain to begin large-scale deliveries of the aid that perhaps 7.5 million Afghans will rely on to get through the brutal winter.

The U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said it had tentatively re-established its presence in Mazar-i-Sharif and Kabul. But UNHCR coordinator Filippo Grandi said Kabul was far from safe.

"From my experience, we were literally confined in the limits of the city. Human assistance is limited, the situation is very fragile. ... If security does not improve, we will not be able to have direct access to the population," he said.

15:38 11-23-01

[H Khan]

Pakistan says it hopes there will be room for revision of those taking part in mapping out Afghanistan's future after the preliminary meeting to be held in Germany next week.

After a meeting with Britain's Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar said he did not believe that moderate elements of the Taliban should necessarily be excluded.

"Many of the generals in the Northern Alliance were once alligned with the Soviets during their intervention in Afghanistan," he said.

"So they have been forgiven for that and I think others might have been aligned with one side or the other. They should not be excluded for that reason alone."

Saturday 24 November, 2001

9:05am AEDT

[Amad Rana]

Why they are in pakistan at the first place ,its mushraff i guess may be he want us all pakistanis to move to africa ,i hope core commanders watching him before he does enough damage to pakistan before fleeing to chicago,i am starting to have doubts about this guy so should our Armed forces
MINGORA: The Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammedi Friday threatened to target Afghan refugees from Northern Alliance areas if its supporters are executed by the alliance in Kunduz.

The siege of Kunduz by the Northern Alliance has raised concern here in an area of Pakistan, dominated by ethnic Pashtun tribes. The tribes sent volunteers to Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban, most of whom are also Pashtun. Many of them are feared trapped in Kunduz, which is surrounded by the Northern Alliance.

Tribes here are threatening to take revenge on non-Pashtun Afghan refugees from ethnic groups which form the core of the US-backed Northern Alliance. "People are angry and will target Afghan refugees belonging to Northern Alliance areas if our people are executed or treated unfairly," said Maulvi Muhammed Khalid Khan, a leader of the Tehrik Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammedi.

The group sent more than 10,000 volunteers to Afghanistan last month to wage jihad (holy war) alongside the Taliban. After the rapid collapse of the Taliban, thousands of volunteers have returned to Pakistan. But hundreds are still stranded in Kunduz and scores have been arrested or executed by the alliance, following the capture of Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul.

Khan said he didn't have any estimates on the number of Pakistanis killed in Afghanistan. However, he said, at least 1,300 Pakistani tribesmen were in Kunduz along with Arabs, Chechens and other foreigners.

Khan said Northern Alliance leaders should realise that Pakistani tribesmen went to Afghanistan to fight against the United States, not any Afghan faction. "They should not take any step causing problem for their people in Pakistan," Khan said.

[osman]

Well if it isnt the same scums who first wanted to destroy pakistan and then the USA, well i think we can all see through their hypocracy.The same people who sent thousands of youths into slaughter while they themselves were enjoying the security of their homes, must know be feeling the ground beneath their feets burn, high time that PM crack on them and does away with groups like these

www.jang.com.pk

PADC to soften anti-govt stance

By Asim Hussain

LAHORE: During the last week's meeting with Punjab Governor Khalid Maqbool, the Pak Afghan Defence Council (PADC) agreed to soften its anti-governemnt stance, informed sources told The News.

In the meeting held on 15th, the PADC also decided to change the planned rally from Nasir Bagh to Regal Chowk into a public meeting at Nila Gumbad. The delegation comprising JI Lahore Ameer Mian Maqsood and PADC local leaders showed complete understanding of government's difficulties which it was facing due to its support to US. They assured the governor of their full cooperation in these hard times, sources added.

The sources said that except for Mujibur Rehman Inqilabi of SSP, none of the leaders demanded release of their detained central leaders. Maulana Abdul Maalik of Jamiat Ittehadul Ulema was the only leader who spoke out his mind, while others told the governor that "the problem in the streets" was the result of the lack of direct contact between the governor and the religious leaders. They urged him to frequently hold such meetings to improve the situation, sources said.

They even did not demand an inquiry into the firing incident in DG Khan in which four demonstrators were killed. Maulana Abdul Maalik criticised Musharraf government's Afghan policy and termed it a betrayal with Islam and the nation. He said the Western and Eastern borders of the country were insecure and demanded that the policies be changed.

However, Qazi Abdul Qadeer Khamosh of Jamaat Ahle Hadith accused Maalik and his Jamiat Ittehadul Ulema of hypocricy. He said at first the party sent its activists to fight against Taliban, but now it was trying to cash in on the public sentiments, sources revealed.

The other participants of the meeting stressed the need for greater confidence between government and religious parties. They included: Maulana Amjad Khan and Saifuddin Saif (JUI-F), Zahid Qasmi JUI-Q), Naeemullah Farooqi (JUI-S), haji Abdul RAzzaq (Jamiat Ahle Hadith), Mustafa Ashraf Rizvi and Mukhtar Ashraf Rizvi of JUP-NS.

[Awaisi]

http://www.jang-group.com/thenews/index.html

Taliban kill 35 US troops

By Ajmad Bashir Siddiqi

KARACHI: At least 35 personnel of the US Special Forces were killed and many injured in an attack by the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, sources told The News on Friday.

The sources said 35 bodies have arrived at Jacobabad Airbase, where heavy activity is being witnessed as the US helicopters are busy bringing in bodies and injured from Afghanistan. The Pentagon and the Centcom are very much perturbed over this development and there are reports of immediate measures being contemplated to counter the situation.

The sources said 10 C-130s are ready to dispatch the bodies to the US. According to sources, the action, which began on Thursday was also backed by helicopter gunships. The US had launched attack against Taliban and al-Qaeda members but were caught by surprise and had to withdraw quickly. The US Embassy and Army sources were tight-lipped about the incident. It is one of the heaviest casualties, suffered by the US Army in one action since they launched attacks against the Taliban.

The reported killing of 35 US troops appears to be action similar to the previous aborted US heli-borne action carried out in mid-October in which the attacking US troops got pinned down in the face of severe hostile enemy fire. The US troops were caught by surprise. So intense was the attack that the Special Forces personnel had to quickly withdraw without any operational achievement. In that attack one US helicopter crashed in Afghanistan while another 'hit' chopper later crashed along with troops and crew in Pakistan.

[Amad Rana]

CRACK IN ALLIANCE ,GEN.DOSTUM HELPING PAKISTANIS TO LEAVE KUNDUZ http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/24/international/asia/24AFGH.html

[osman]

It kinda belongs in the humor thread but anyway, notice these guys talking about Pakistan's interests, coming from the same people who were threatning to destroy pakistan with a civil war. Nothing but hypos these guys


www.nation.com.pk
Afghan refugees asked to leave Pakistan

By Shahzad Raza
ISLAMABAD – Pak-Afghan Defence Council (PADC), on Friday warned Afghan refugees either to leave Pakistan or get ready to face dire consequences.
Speaking at a demonstration in G- 9 Markaz, Ghazi Abdul Rashid alleged the majority of Afghan refugees in Pakistan are pro-Northern Alliance, which always tried to harm the country.
“We would force them to leave our country and convey a massage to the Northern Alliance to stop hostile actions against Pakistan,” he added.
He said that activists of Northern Alliance had abused Pakistan and raised anti-Pakistan slogans when they occupied Kabul. “Is this a response to Pakistan’s support given to Northern Alliance at the time of Afghan-Russia war,” he questioned.
He claimed that although Taliban had retreated for the time being, yet they would come up again and reoccupy the entire Afghanistan.
Maulana Nazir Farooqi claimed that the policies of Pakistan government had failed as the US did not honour the promises it made to president General Pervez Musharraf for support to the US in its war against Afghanistan.
“Both foreign and internal policies of the government had failed because Pakistan had been isolated not only from the West but also from the Muslim Ummah. Similarly, demonstration are being staged, arrest are being made and fake cases are being registered in the country,” he said.
Maulana Mumtazul Haq Siddiqui criticised the closure of Afghan embassy in Pakistan saying that if Afghan embassy can be closed, embassies of the US, UK, Russia, France and Canada should also be closed down.
A trader of the area, Muhammad Kashif, said Northern Alliance should mend its ways and otherwise PADC will also wage Jihad against it.
Maulana Shabir Ahmed Kashmiri said time has come for a Fatwa (decree) of Jihad against the government.
The participants of the demonstration dispersed peacefully. Heavy contingent of police was present on this occasion to maintain law and order.

[Sultan]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1673000/1673985.stm

[Gaf]

I thought that they had been released, but it doesn't seem to be the case...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6708-2001Nov23.html

[H Khan]

By CHRIS TOMLINSON
.c The Associated Press


SORKHUD, Afghanistan (AP) - Gul Haidar smiled as he sifted some seeds through his fingers, happy he had planted the one crop that should ensure his family's welfare next year - opium poppies.

In pencil-thin, spiraling furrows dug with a homemade plow pulled by oxen, Haidar has sown the tiny, pale specks that will yield flowers in four months. When the petals fall, buyers will come for the seed pods and its opium resin.

The Pashto-speaking farmer expects to triple what he had made from the winter wheat he had planted the last three seasons.

With the Taliban no longer around to enforce a three-year ban on poppy-growing, hundreds of farmers near the eastern city of Jalalabad - their appetite for profit sharpened by years of drought and hardship - have resumed planting what they call ``narcotic.''

``We don't have much water, so with narcotic we make more money to offset the problem of the drought,'' Haidar said. ``If you water twice a year, narcotic will do very well, but with wheat, you have to water nine times.''

Miles of flat fields surround Jalalabad, with barren desert mountains visible in the distance. Hundreds of miles of irrigation canals funnel runoff from mountain springs and creeks onto the fields, but after three years without rain, water is precious.

The 75-year-old Haidar, who lives in a mud house, has rented his 750 acres from a wealthy Afghan for the past half-century.

Before the Taliban ban, he almost exclusively grew poppies. During the past three years, he switched to wheat rather than risk imprisonment. But Haidar had stashed a bag of poppy seeds - and brought them out when the Taliban fled Jalalabad this month, in time for planting season.

Now he has sown 250 acres of poppies, which he said will yield 650 pounds of opium.

``It will be just enough to live,'' Haidar said. ``I have a family of 10, so I work just to live, eat and for clothes.''

Afghanistan was once the world's largest opium producer, enough to supply 75 percent of the world's heroin, according to the U.N. Drug Control Program.

Farmers produced 3,611 tons from the 1999 planting. But after a ruthless Taliban crackdown, the crop in 2000 dropped to 204 tons, the agency said in July.

Most of the opium is exported and is rarely used locally.

Mujahed, a 42-year-old farmer who uses only one name, said buyers give him an advance so that he can buy fertilizer and survive until the crop comes in. They return during the annual harvest to buy his seed pods and take the opium to Pakistan, where, he says, ``they make the stuff that is very bad.''

``But we don't know about the advantages or disadvantages for other people,'' Mujahed said. ``I don't know what they do with it. ... For me, there are a lot of advantages over wheat.''

The U.N. drug program spent years working with the Taliban and aid agencies to discourage poppy growing and encourage wheat production. But farmers outside Jalalabad said they never saw any of the aid money that was funneled through the Taliban.

``The Westerners, when they want to help us, they should put the aid in our hands, not give it to the leaders,'' Mujahed said, adding that he would stop growing poppies if given an alternative.

But Kasim, a 65-year-old white bearded farmer, was less sympathetic.

``Our life is really very difficult, because we can't grow wheat and still survive,'' he said. ``We need to grow narcotic, even if it is not fair to the rest of the world.''

AP-NY-11-24-01 1305EST

[H Khan]

.c The Associated Press


PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP)- At least eight U.S. bombs exploded on Pakistani territory Saturday during a raid on Taliban positions along the mountainous frontier with Afghanistan, witnesses and local officials said.

There were no deaths or injuries on the Pakistan side but at least 13 Afghans were killed and two others injured on their side of the border, a local resident said.

The Pentagon had no immediate comment.

The target of the raid appeared to have been an abandoned Taliban training camp in Paktia province about 180 miles southwest of Peshawar, witnesses said.

A three-room office of Pakistani border guards was demolished, but no one was inside, a regional official said on condition of anonymity.

One local resident, Mohammad Afzal Khan, said the attack began at 6.20 a.m, and that he counted eight detonations on the Pakistani side of the border.

Khan said the Taliban had abandoned the camp but several Afghan tribesmen had moved into the buildings.

AP-NY-11-24-01 1343EST

[Amad Rana]

BY ALEX PERRY/MAZAR-I-SHARIF

war crimes against pakistanis

Monday, Nov. 26, 2001
One of the first western reporters to reach Mazar-i-Sharif, I was ushered into the home of Ustad Atta Mohammed, the Northern Alliance commander who--along with warlords Rashid Dostum and Haji Mohammed Mohaqiq--had taken the city a few days before. An ethnic Tajik, Atta, 37, is a bearded giant given to joking and easy small talk. He invited me to sit on his carpet and share a meal of qabeli, the Afghan national dish of rice, raisins, mutton, carrots and onions. In the past week, he has established himself as the unofficial mayor of Mazar, presiding over meetings of tribal elders and hearing pleas for increased security. He and his men have the city, but as they consolidated control, they massacred 100 Pakistani Taliban fighters who were trying to surrender--and then watched as 12 of their own mullahs, on a peace mission to the Taliban resisters, were executed while clutching their holy texts. In retaliation, the Alliance soldiers then slaughtered the rest of the resisters.



As Atta and his security chief, Wasiq, described how Mazar had been taken, it became clear that this fighting had finished only hours before I arrived. They told me about Sultan Raziya, a girls' school in the southeast part of the city, where Pakistani "tourists," as they called them, had held out until late Tuesday. Reports of a massacre there had filtered out of Mazar the weekend before. "Many people died there," said Wasiq. "We had to kill many." I asked if I could visit the site. Wasiq smiled and said I would have to get permission from Atta.

As we approached Sultan Raziya the next morning, a Red Cross team was sifting the rubble and transferring bodies and pieces of bodies onto a flatbed tractor trailer. The stench of death hung across the ruins. The team concentrated on intact bodies that could be lifted by the arms and legs. There had been more than 300 of them so far. With Atta's permission, I was given free rein to climb through the rubble, stepping past corpse after corpse, many of them dismembered. Elsewhere, fire had reduced everything--furniture, clothing, people--to ash.

[hassany]

November 25, 2001
Putin's the big winner in Bush's war
By ERIC MARGOLIS
Contributing Foreign Editor
Did the United States go to war with Afghanistan for Central Asian oil and gas? That's what many readers keep asking me. They clearly distrust the White House's jingoistic bombast about defending freedom and western values from evil Islamists.

The answer is no, and yes.

The U.S. attacked Afghanistan's Taliban government to exact revenge for the Sept. 11 attacks on America. But it quickly occurred to former oilmen George Bush and Dick Cheney that retribution against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden offered a golden opportunity to expand American geopolitical influence into South and Central Asia, scene of the Caspian Basin oil boom.

The ex-Soviet states of Central Asia and the Caucasus - Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kirgizstan, Azerbaijan and Chechnya - contain the world's most recently discovered major oil and gas deposits.

The world has ample oil today. But according to CIA estimates, when China and India reach South Korea's level of per capita energy use, within 30 years, their combined oil demand will be 120 million barrels daily. Today, total global consumption is 60-70 million barrels a day. In short, the major powers will be locked in fierce competition for scarce oil, with the Persian Gulf and Central Asia the focus of this rivalry.

Central Asia's oil and gas producers are landlocked. Their energy wealth must be exported through long pipelines. Competition over potential pipeline routes has become the 21st century's geopolitical equivalent of the great power race to build strategic railroads, a rivalry that helped spark World War I.

He who controls energy, controls the globe. The U.S. imports only 7% of its energy from the Mideast, but holds on to this vital region in order to control the energy source of its European and Japanese allies.

Russia, the world's second largest oil exporter, wants Central Asian resources to be transported across its territory. Iran, also an oil producer, wants the energy pipelines to debouche at its ports, the shortest route. But America's powerful Israel lobby has blocked Washington's efforts to deal with Iran.

The United States and Pakistan have long sought to build pipelines running due south from Termez, Uzbekistan, to Kabul, Afghanistan, then down to Pakistan's Arabian Sea ports at Karachi and Gwadar. Oilmen call this route, "the new Silk Road," after the fabled route used to export China's riches. But this requires a stable, pro-western Afghanistan.

Iran has intrigued in Afghanistan since 1989 to keep that nation in disorder, thus preventing rival Pakistan from building its long-sought Termez-Karachi pipeline.

EXPECTATIONS DENIED

When Pakistan ditched its ally, the Taliban, in September, and sided with the U.S., Islamabad and Washington fully expected to implant a pro-American regime in Kabul and open the way for the Pak-American pipeline. But this was not to be.

In a dazzling coup, Russian President Vladimir Putin stole a march on the Bush administration, which was so busy trying to tear apart Afghanistan to find bin Laden it failed to notice the Russians were taking over half the country.

The wily Russians achieved this victory through their proxy Afghan force, the Northern Alliance. Moscow, which has sustained the Alliance since 1990, re-armed it after Sept. 11 with new tanks, armoured vehicles, artillery, helicopters and trucks. The Alliance's two military leaders, Gen. Rashid Dostam and Gen. Muhammed Fahim, were stalwarts of the old Communist regime with close links to the KGB.

Putin put the chief of the Russian general staff, Viktor Kvashnin, and the deputy director of the KGB, in charge of the Alliance. During the Balkan fighting in 1999, the hard-charging Kvashnin outfoxed the U.S. by seizing Pristina's airfield, thus assuring a permanent Russian role in Kosovo.

Now, he's done it again. To the fury of Washington and Islamabad, Kvashnin rushed the Northern Alliance into Kabul, in direct contravention of Bush's dictates. The Alliance is now Afghanistan's dominant force and, heedless of multi-party political talks in Germany this weekend, styles itself the new "lawful" government, a claim fully backed by Moscow.

DEFEAT REVENGED

The Russians have regained influence over Afghanistan, revenged their defeat by the U.S. in the 1980s' war, and neatly checkmated the Bush administration which, for all its high-tech military power, understood little about Afghanistan.

America's ouster of the Taliban regime meant Pakistan lost its former influence over Afghanistan and is now cut off from Central Asia's resources. So long as the Alliance holds power, the U.S. is equally denied access to the much coveted Caspian Basin. Russia has regained control of the best potential pipeline routes. The "new Silk Road" will become a Russian energy superhighway.

By charging like an enraged bull into the South Asian china shop, the U.S. handed a stunning geopolitical victory to the Russians and severely damaged its own great power ambitions. Moscow is now free to continue plans to dominate South and Central Asia in concert with its strategic allies, India and Iran.

The Bush administration does not appear to understand its enormous blunder, and keeps insisting the Russians are now our friends.

Dear President Bush: Ask your dad. He will tell you that where oil is concerned, there are no friends, only competitors and enemies.

[H Khan]

By Michael Steen


KABUL, Nov 25 (Reuters) - Ousted Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani held out an olive branch to his enemies on Sunday, saying individual former Taliban officials could join a future government for the ethnically riven nation.

He also pledged that his troops would not kill non-Afghan Taliban troops who surrendered in Kunduz, the last northern city outside Northern Alliance control, and elsewhere.

Rabbani was speaking ahead of U.N.-sponsored talks in Bonn on Tuesday where representatives of four loose Afghan groups will seek to lay out a roadmap for a broad-based post-Taliban government.

"I should emphasise that as an organisation or party the Taliban will not be included," said Rabbani, who nominally heads the Northern Alliance, which has driven the Taliban out of most of the northern Afghanistan with the help of seven weeks of heavy U.S. bombing.

"But as individuals they will not be held guilty. Those that don't have very obvious guilt and are elected by a Loya Jirga are acceptable," he told a news conference.

The Northern Alliance has said it backs the idea of a traditional Loya Jirga, or grand assembly of tribal chiefs and elders, to agree a broad-based government to replace the Taliban.

Rabbani said Mullah Khaksar, a former Taliban deputy interior minister, was a good example of his Tajik- and Uzbek-dominated alliance's readiness to work with others, including ex-Taliban officials whose powerbase is the Pashtun south of the country.

Khaksar made his first public appearance on Saturday since defecting to the alliance when Kabul fell on November 13.

Pakistan in particular has pressed for "moderate Taliban" to be given a role in a future government.

Suspicious of the intentions of the Alliance's backers -- Iran, Russia and arch-foe India -- Islamabad is also concerned that the Pashtuns, Afghanistan's largest ethnic group, will not be adequately represented at the U.N. talks.

NOT KILLING ARABS

Rabbani dismissed as "propaganda" claims that Northern Alliance troops indiscriminately killed Arabs, Chechens, Pakistanis and other non-Afghans fighting for the Taliban.

"These foreigners who ask for pardon from us, we will hand over to the United Nations, they will know what to do," he said. "(But) if they are killed in fighting, that is their destiny."

Concern over Northern Alliance treatment of foreign Taliban was raised after the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) said last week it had found up to 600 bodies in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

Rabbani said he had ordered his troops besieging Kunduz, defended by thousands of Taliban and foreign fighters, to observe international law when taking prisoners.

"Yesterday 500 people surrendered to our forces (near Kunduz)," he said. "Some of them were Chechens who had hand grenades, which they exploded and in doing so killed General Nadir Ali and injured commander Assad."

"Still, I emphasised to (Northern Alliance) General Dostum, don't harm them, they must be saved," he said.

MAJORITY AT BONN MEETING

Rabbani did not say who would be representing the Northern Alliance, also called the United Front, in Bonn, but made a point of repeating that his delegation should be in the majority.

"Regarding the composition of the delegation, the conversations we had with Mr (Fransesc) Vendrell, the U.N. deputy representative on Afghanistan, agreed that 50 percent plus one would be from the United Front, and 49 percent would be from all other circles," he said.

He said there should be 11 Northern Alliance representatives; four from the so-called Rome group, which supports exiled King Zahir Shah; three from the Peshawar group of Pashtuns living in Pakistan; and three from the Cyprus group, which was set up in the late 1990s by Iran to rival the king's group.

"They will agree on a provisional shura (council) which will talk about forming a provisional administration," said Rabbani.

The next step would be to convene an emergency Loya Jirga and seek its endorsement. "Once the provisional shura has been approved by the Loya Jirga, the Islamic state of Afghanistan will hand power over to that administration," Rabbani said.

05:36 11-25-01

[H Khan]

KARACHI, Nov 25 (Reuters) - Police in the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi raided an office used by the Taliban in the early hours of Sunday and arrested more than a dozen people, officials and witnesses said.

"We have sealed the office, but I don't know about any arrests being made during the raid," a senior police official said.

The official declined to give the reason for the raid, but sources in the local police department said the raid was carried out "on instructions from Islamabad."

Witnesses said police raided the office at about 2:30 a.m. (2130 GMT Saturday) and arrested more than a dozen people.

"Police also seized documents and literature from the office," one witness said.

Earlier this month Pakistan closed the Taliban consulate in Karachi, saying it was being used for anti-government activities.

Pakistan, once a leading supporter of the fundamentalist militia, also ordered the closure of the Taliban embassy in Islamabad and its consulates in Quetta and Peshawar this month.

06:25 11-25-01

[H Khan]

By Michael Christie


QUETTA, Pakistan, Nov 25 (Reuters) - Ethnic Pashtun warlords and leaders from southern Afghanistan on Sunday urged the United States to do more to secure the fall of the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar -- their last redoubt.

The clerics, scholars, chiefs and veteran military commanders from Afghanistan's largest tribe also announced in Pakistan that they would send a final delegation to the ancient walled city to seek the peaceful surrender of the Taliban's last holdout.

But many acknowledged that the chances of negotiating with Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar were slim as he and thousands of diehard soldiers cling to Kandahar, from where they launched their sweep of Afghanistan seven years ago.

"We called the meeting of all the people of this side to tell the Taliban to put down their ammunition or face the consequences," said Izatullah Wasifi, son of an aide to former Afghan monarch Zahir Shah.

"I don't think we are in a position to give them an ultimatum. But killing each other is no solution to our problem."

Gathering in the dozens in the southwest Pakistani city of Quetta, the Pashtun tribal leaders sitting cross-legged on colourful, hand-woven Afghan rugs in a large courtyard insisted the only solution for war-torn Afghanistan was a Loya Jirga, or grand council.

To be presided over by Zahir Shah, the council would decide on a broad-based government now the Taliban have been kicked out of most of Afghanistan by the Northern Alliance after weeks of U.S. bombing.

Afghanistan's Pashtun tribes have been left reeling by the military successes in the north of the ethnic Tajik and Uzbek-dominated Northern Alliance, and, lacking a standing army of their own, have been seeking a diplomatic victory over the Taliban in the south.

Pashtun leaders said they needed more help from the U.S.-led alliance, waging war on the Taliban because of the fundamentalist Islamic movement's harbouring of Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden, Washington's chief suspect in the September 11 attacks.

"We don't get enough support from the coalition forces. They are helping our people but it's not enough," Wasifi told reporters, calling for funds, weapons, intensified U.S. bombing and U.S.-led troops.

AFGHANS NOT WINNING THIS WAR

Afghan forces were not winning this war, he said.

"In the Northern Alliance it wasn't the ground battles between Taliban forces and Northern Alliance (that routed the Taliban). The most damage and destruction was from the (U.S.-led) coalition forces which pushed the Taliban out of the north."

The pro-king Pashtuns met on Sunday to decide who to send in a delegation to Kandahar to urge the Taliban there to spare the population further fighting.

Ahmad Karzai, brother of Popalzai nobleman Hamid Karzai who is operating inside Afghanistan with anti-Taliban forces, said the delegation would seek out the Taliban leadership.

It was not clear if they would try to get a hearing with Mullah Omar, nor when the envoys would be sent.

But some of the chieftains taking part in the Quetta meeting were sceptical about further talks.

Mohammad Akbar Khan Khakrazi, a former mujahideen commander, said he went to Kandahar a week ago to talk to Taliban commanders. But they showed no interest.

"They have never been in favour of talks, they always go to war," Khakrazi told Reuters. "Of course now is the time to fight."

While Karzai and former Kandahar mujahideen governor Gul Agha are already operating inside southern Afghanistan with a fighting force believed to number around 1,000, it was not clear that the tribal leaders meeting in Quetta had any military muscle to call on.

Many of their top leaders have been assassinated, others forced to live in Europe or the United States because they were unwelcome in Pakistan during the years Islamabad sponsored the Taliban.

Wasifi was living in New York until November 16. He said one reason he came to Quetta was to try to promote some cohesion among Pashtuns -- divided among former mujahideen, the Taliban and exiles -- so they could take on the Taliban in the name of Zahir Shah.

08:17 11-25-01

[H Khan]

By KEN GUGGENHEIM
.c The Associated Press


WASHINGTON (AP) - U.S. officials are exploring ways to prevent a surge in opium cultivation in Afghanistan, once the world's leading producer, now that the Taliban's control is crumbling.

The challenge is persuading the factions likely to govern to fight opium production and trafficking, when these groups in the past have shown little inclination to do that.

U.S. counternarcotics officials want to make drug-fighting a condition for receiving international humanitarian aid. They expect some of the assistance will include programs to encourage Afghan farmers to give up opium, the raw material for heroin, in favor of wheat and other legal crops.

Representatives of U.S. anti-drug agencies have met to begin developing a counterdrug plan. With efforts under way to form a new multiethnic government in Afghanistan, the opium issue is attracting the attention of leading Bush administration officials.

U.S. policy-makers had limited interest in it before the Sept. 11 attacks. Afghan opium is sold mostly in Europe and Asia. It accounts for only a tiny fraction of the heroin sold in the United States, most of which is from Latin America.

After Sept. 11, Afghan opium was seen in a new light: as an important moneymaker for the Taliban militia that harbored Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the attacks.

Afghan opium production surged after the Taliban took control of most of the country in 1996, and reached a peak of 4,030 U.S. tons last year, according to State Department statistics. That accounted for 72 percent of the world market.

Citing Islamic principles, the Taliban banned opium, virtually eliminating it from its territory this year. U.S. officials suspect the Taliban was trying to reduce the opium supply to boost the price of existing stockpiles.

The ban remains in effect, but farmers began ignoring it after Sept. 11.

``The farmers are poor people and they need money and the opium crop is a profitable crop for them, said Mohammad Amirkhizi, an official of the U.N. Drug Control Program in Vienna, Austria.

``If the conditions remain in a way that no one is enforcing the noncultivation of illicit drugs in Afghanistan, then the farmers will go back to cultivating,'' he said.

The Taliban's rivals have not tried to ban opium and some are believed to have profited from the drug trade. The northern alliance, which now controls more than half the country, ``has taken no action of which we are aware against cultivation and trafficking in its area,'' the State Department said in March.

Asa Hutchinson, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said it is too early to tell how cooperative the northern alliance will be in the future.

``Certainly we're not naive that the northern alliance does not have their own interest and history in poppy cultivation and trafficking,'' he said. ``But it's certainly a new world in Afghanistan and we're just going to have to work hard to encourage (an) anti-drug policy.''

Hutchinson said the DEA has been working with Afghanistan's neighbors, including Pakistan, to help block the movement of Afghan opium through their territory.

S. Frederick Starr, a Central Asia specialist at Johns Hopkins University, said rejecting opium will be one of four important conditions for any Afghan faction seeking international recognition and aid. The other conditions are rejecting terrorism and supporting human rights and democracy.

``Different groups will find it more difficult or easier, but in the end they'll have no choice,'' he said.

Amirkhizi said that besides insisting that the next Afghan government curb opium cultivation and trafficking, the international community should provide opium farmers with help in switching to legal crops.

The U.S. Agency for International Development was considering such a program in southern Afghanistan, channeling assistance through a nongovernmental organization. The plan was derailed by the Sept. 11 attacks.

Andrew S. Natsios, the agency's administrator, said he hopes it can move ahead with the program once Afghanistan becomes more stable. Even then, the program would have to be tested in a limited area before being expanded nationwide.

``We certainly want to find an alternative to opium production,'' he said. ``However, you don't start a program unless you can prove its worth. We're not going to go in and invest $50 million and have it fail on you.''

[H Khan]

By MATT KELLEY
.c The Associated Press


WASHINGTON (AP) - American airstrikes helped subdue an uprising by Taliban prisoners of war at a fortress in northern Afghanistan, U.S. military spokesmen said Sunday. Hundreds of the foreign Taliban prisoners were killed, but U.S. military forces were all accounted for, Pentagon officials said.

The U.S. Central Command, which oversees the war in Afghanistan, declined to say if U.S. forces were in the fortress when the fighting broke out. But a German television crew at the scene of the fight taped a U.S. special forces soldier calling in U.S. airstrikes on the fortress near the city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

The U.S. soldier, who identified himself only as David, is shown on the video from Germany's ARD network. ``I don't know how many Americans there were,'' he says on the tape. ``I think one was killed, but I'm not sure. There were two of us at least, me and some other guy.''

A Pentagon spokesman, Marine Lt. Col. David Lapan, said later that no U.S. military personnel were killed in the uprising. ``All our military forces in Afghanistan are accounted for,'' he said.

Tom Crispell, a spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency, which has operatives working with anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan, said the agency had no comment on the operation.

The Taliban fighters, who had been captured near the militia's last northern stronghold of Kunduz, carried concealed weapons and tried to fight their way out of the fortress, said Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Dan Stoneking.

Both Culler and Stoneking said U.S. aircraft bombed the fortress during the fighting. Witnesses said the bombs hit an area of the compound where the Taliban fighters were.

The U.S. special forces troops in Afghanistan work with anti-Taliban military commanders, including Rashid Dostum, whose forces held the prisoners. The U.S. troops also carry radios and other equipment to call for and guide U.S. airstrikes against Taliban forces.

The Taliban soldiers appeared to have planned the battle, ``which appears to be a suicide mission on their part,'' Culler said. Most of the Taliban fighters were not Afghans and were from Pakistan and Chechnya, Stoneking said.

Dostum brought in about 500 of his fighters to quell the uprising, Stoneking said.

Foreign fighters in Kunduz had insisted on security guarantees following reports of summary executions by the northern alliance in Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul, the Afghan capital.

AP-NY-11-25-01 1805EST

[SyedA]

U.S. airstrikes used to quash uprising by pro-Taliban forces

ASSOCIATED PRESS

MAZAR-E-SHARIF, Afghanistan, Nov. 25 Northern alliance forces and U.S. airstrikes put down a prison uprising Sunday by foreign pro-Taliban captives from the northern city of Kunduz, U.S. and alliance spokesmen said. The alliance and a member of the U.S. special forces at the scene said hundreds of foreign fighters were killed.



THE PRISONERS were mostly Pakistanis, Chechens and Arabs believed loyal to Osama bin Laden. Alliance spokesman Zaher Wahadat said they seized weapons from their guards and captured an ammunition depot, using it to fight the troops deployed to put down the unrest.
A Pentagon spokesman said about 300 fighters took part in the riot, which was put down with U.S. airstrikes and fighters of northern alliance Gen. Rashid Dostum, who controls the Qalai Janghi fortress where the riot took place.
They were all killed and very few were arrested, Wahadat said.
Footage from a German television crew that was inside the compound, 10 miles west of Mazar-e-Sharif, showed guards atop walls firing down into crowds of prisoners below.

HUNDREDS REPORTED DEAD
As tanks rolled into the compound, a member of the U.S. special forces who identified himself only as David could be seen on a telephone calling in airstrikes, the footage from the ARD network showed.

There's hundreds dead here at least, he could be overheard saying.
Yahsaw, a spokesman for northern alliance commander Mohammed Mohaqik, said the prisoners broke down the doors and tried to escape, then battled all day with guards at the Qalai Janghi fortress.
The Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Dan Stoneking, confirmed that some U.S. special forces were in the compound when the fighting broke out, and said it appears all U.S. personnel are accounted for and believed safe.
Stoneking said the fighting involved about 300 hard-core Taliban? prisoners, most of them from Pakistan and Chechnya. He said some of the fighters had smuggled weapons into the prison compound and began fighting northern alliance forces.

Footage from a German television crew that was inside the compound, 10 miles west of Mazar-e-Sharif, showed guards atop walls firing down into crowds of prisoners below.

GENERAL PANDEMONIUM
There was general pandemonium, said Simon Brooks, head of Red Cross operations for northern Afghanistan, who was at the prison to check on the detainees? condition when gunfire rang out.
Dostum brought in about 500 of his troops and quashed the riot with the help of airstrikes from U.S. forces, Stoneking said.


Explosions could still be heard from the direction of the compound Sunday evening, and gunfire could be heard on the streets of Mazar-e-Sharif.
Brooks said he fled from the compound by climbing onto the roof with northern alliance commanders, and when he returned in the afternoon he found three men with serious injuries making their way toward Mazar-e-Sharif.
He couldn't get close to the prison because U.S. airstrikes were targeting the southern part of the compound, where the prisoners were being held, he said.
The prisoners had surrendered outside of the nearby city of Kunduz, which the northern alliance claimed to have captured Sunday, under a deal aimed at ending a 12-day siege by the alliance. Under the deal, they were to be imprisoned and investigated for ties to bin Laden's al-Qaida network.

SECURITY CONCERNS
Foreign fighters in Kunduz had insisted on security guarantees following reports of summary executions by the northern alliance in Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul.

Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has repeatedly appealed to the United States and Britain to prevent massacres of Pakistani fighters, many of whom went to Afghanistan after the bombing campaign began.
But the spokesman for Pakistan?s military-led government, Gen. Rashid Quereshi, said Sunday night that it was too early to comment on the uprising.
We are not even sure whether there were any Pakistanis there,? he said. We don?t have any presence in Afghanistan. We have to check the facts first before making any comments.

[Sultan]

Dostum and all those other NA B*stards have to be removed from the picture now!!!!! They want war we'll give them war!! :mad: :mad:

[Amad Rana]

They want war we'll give them war!! nice dream,sultan .but its not possible as long as PM is our head of state. this guy has become a disgrace to Pakistan,its people and more importantly Pakistan army. He let NA to Kill hundreds of Pakistanis like pigs in mazar-sheriff. he replaced all generals with any trace of nationalism with hand picked chickens .I won't be surprised if in future we find out that he himself ordered the killing of these Pakistanis with the collaboration of NA to get rid of any opposition at home. I don't care if those Pakistanis were there for what ever reason,they were Pakistanis after all and this PM failed to protect their lives .he did not even tried despite me and many others at pakdef were telling that its coming. remember that low life scum bag of NA aliens ABDULLAH ABDULLAH ,now he has done it, and as long as this sob walking arround on this earth,will reminde us the insult he has done to pakistan ,its people and its chicken led army .he was openly threatening to kill all Pakistanis captured or no captured .Now only thing he can do wipe out this son of bitch or face killing of every NA elements in Pakistan including refugees of north Afghanistan ,and please don't give the crap about helping Muslim brothers ,these vermin's are not Muslims because they just killed 700-fellow pakistani Muslims in cold blood in the month of ramadan

[Abbas]

U.S. is committing more ground combat troops. Perhaps there is intelligence that OBL is holed up in Kandahar.

NavBaby.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14292-2001Nov25.html

[AkramIshaqKhan]

COLD BLOOD...

PM is no longer my president. To hell with him. By allowing this massacre to happen (IT WAS SO OBVIOUS) he has lost all legitamcy in my view.

Do you think such a thing could have ever happened to Americans or any other European nation. Just a hand-full of europeans preaching christianity garnered more sympathy from this ISPR mouthpiece than nearly 700 Pakistanis.

I am sorry... this really is murder and I think the American government, NA and Musharraf all share the blame. Obviously first on this LIST should be the damn Mullahs in Pakistan who sent these poor souls in to Afghanistan to begin with. They are the ones who should be lynched. The same mullahs who are now hiding.

Dostum should get a bullet in his head. He is a brtual thug who has perpetrated so much inhumanity that I think he might just be a bit psycohtic. And even the damn Turks are complicit since they are the backers of Dostum. Could these even have been Turks? What is WRONG with you Pakistanis? Trust me once the Pakistani blood get cheapened then no Pakistani will be safe.

700 HUNDRED PAKISTANIS
No matter what you cannot KILL all prisoners. Even if this so-called revolt did happen it could never have been all 700. All throughout last week and before American media and analyst were opening stating that getting these Talib fighters to surrender is not something they want. THEY WANT THEM DEAD. Well the surrender did happen, and another ingenious way was figured to kill off these Pakistanis. SHAMEFUL.

JK.

[AkramIshaqKhan]

So much for four bases and virtual giving the keys of Pakistan to the US. This is what we get in return.
I wonder what great spin ISPR is going to put on this.

US offers arms to India to combat ‘militants’

NEW DELHI (AFP) - The United States has offered India sensors, unmanned aerial vehicles and other technical equipment to combat the infiltration of fighters into Kashmir, the Hindu daily said Sunday.
The offer was made when Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee visited Washington earlier this month to discuss the global campaign against terrorism and the ongoing US-led military conflict in Afghanistan.
‘If India is satisfied with the equipment, it would have the option of buying them in larger quantities to strengthen its surveillance,’ the report said. If confirmed, the offer would be the first shipment of American aid to India to counter the ‘insurgency’ in Kashmir.
New Delhi and Washington have been working together for the last two years on the broad issue of terrorism. In September, US President George W. Bush partially lifted sanctions against India and Pakistan which were imposed in May 1998 after the two countries carried out tit-for-tat nuclear weapons tests.
But the US has continued a long-standing ban on exports to India of certain strategic equipment.
However, US ambassador to India Robert D Blackwill recently said that restrictions on the sale of military supplies to India were likely be lifted following Bush’s summit with Vajpayee on November 9.
He said US was looking at striking a long-term defence cooperation deal with India as the country was likely to emerge as a key security power in Asia.

[Amad Rana]

A member of RAWA bleeds from the impact of police baton during a protest rally in Islamabad "against the fundamentalists domination in Afghanistan &Pakistan" . why these NA afghan women are in the capitol of Pakistan???why not in USA,Tehran,or in kabul (its free now ,right),anyone,who BTW are major cause of prostitution and spread of immorality in islamabad

[Amad Rana]

.

[Amad Rana]

:mad:

[hassany]

A rough road ahead for new Afghanistan
Haroon Siddiqui
STAR COLUMNIST

THE WAR in Afghanistan is complicated enough — internal dissent, external meddling and a shaky international coalition. It does not need the additional burden of a parallel war on Iraq, as American hawks want. That will only split the allies and derail plans for post-Taliban Afghanistan.

Saddam Hussein may be better dead than alive but Iraq has been bombed enough for a decade without dislodging him, while killing innocents already suffering under economic sanctions. There is also no credible evidence of links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden beyond a report that one of the Sept. 11 hijackers once met an Iraqi operative in Prague.

A new offensive against Iraq, wisely opposed by Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, would anger most of the Muslim and Arab world, and empower Saddam and bin Laden. It is a foolish idea, for now.

While all wars are messy and not all produce clean solutions, the one in Afghanistan is more convoluted than most. Its greatest challenges seem to begin just when victory is at hand.

There is no leader presumptive. No Nelson Mandela, no Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, not even a Jose Ramos-Horta, as in East Timor, or an Ibrahim Rugova, as in Kosovo.

Two weeks after the takeover of Kabul, the capital, a dangerous power vacuum remains, and not merely because the Taliban are not yet fully routed and bin Laden not captured.

Northern Alliance victories have only brought the return of the warlords to their fiefdoms from whence they are jockeying for a share of national power. Having used foreign help, they spurn an international stabilizing force. They cloak their resistance in the name of national sovereignty. But, possession being nine-tenths of the law in Afghanistan, they really fear losing bargaining power by ceding turf.

Proof lies in their equally strenuous resistance to the return of their ex-king, Zahir Shah, from exile, for the minimalist role of a unifying symbol. They will tolerate no rivals for the spoils.

There is no denying the historic Afghan antipathy to foreign rule. Citing it, veteran United Nations special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi has postponed deployment of 4,000 British and 1,000 Canadian soldiers on standby. He has persuaded Washington to hold off calling in the allies at least until after he opens the week-long meeting of Afghan factions in Bonn on Tuesday.

But it is difficult to see how an all-Afghan force can neutrally enforce peace, given the decade-long murderous divisions of a dysfunctional society. A glance at the dizzyingly complex cast of characters makes the point. That the Northern Alliance represents only the northern Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara minorities, and the Taliban the majority Pashtuns of the south, is only the first layer of the puzzle.

There are serious divisions within, on both sides, inside and outside Afghanistan.

Former president Burhanuddin Rabbani, a Tajik, has retaken Kabul. Another Tajik, Ismail Khan, has reoccupied Herat. Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek, has recaptured Mazar-e-Sharif.

On the non-Taliban Pashtun side, Abdul Qadir has reclaimed Jalalabad, where in 1996 he had welcomed bin Laden back from Sudan.

Then there are the leaders in exile.

Besides the king in Rome and a Hazara group in Cyprus, the most prominent non-Taliban Pashtuns are in Pakistan. It is there that thrice as many Pashtuns live as in Afghanistan. It is from Pakistan that the 1979-1989 war of liberation against Soviet occupation was waged. It is there that the Taliban were born and their adversaries live, two of whom are strong candidates for a new government in Kabul: Syed Ahmad Gailani, a Sufi saint, and Ahmad Karzai, a much younger leader.

There is also a B-team of second-generation leaders, on both sides, promoting themselves to gullible wandering foreign correspondents.

The divisions have been exposed and exacerbated by the recent murders of the most charismatic leader on each side — Tajik general Ahmad Shah Massoud, by bin Laden operatives on behalf of the Taliban, and dissident Pashtun commander Abdul Haq, by the Taliban for venturing on to their turf to encourage defections.

Then there are the neighbouring puppet masters, Pakistan, Iran and Uzbekistan, and to a lesser extent, China and Tajikistan. The least excusable meddling is of non-neighbours, Russia and India, through support for the Northern Alliance, to reinforce their regional hegemony.

The first order of business for Brahimi ought to be to convince U.S. President George W. Bush to lean on these power brokers to back off, just as Pakistan has had to abandon the Taliban.

Let the United Nations get on with the job.

Given these complexities, Brahimi's modest goal this week is to start a three-year process: Set up "a provisional council" to lead to a loya jirga, the traditional conclave of all tribes, to an interim government to draft a constitution to hold a census to set the scene for an election.

His provisions for the long journey ahead are few but precious: loyalty among all factions to the idea of one Afghan nation, despite all their differences; a moderate view of Islam, which made the Taliban's an aberration rather than the norm; an amazing degree of resilience among Afghans, and an overwhelming desire on their part, if not their leaders, to find the compromises necessary to end 22 years of war; and a newly discovered political, military and monetary commitment by the outside world to stay engaged until the job is done.

[hassany]

Depressing article, when will God's help come ??

Blood, tears, terror and tragedy behind the lines
By Robert Fisk, the only Western journalist in Taliban-held Kandahar province
26 November 2001
"You'll never get through,'' the Taliban man shouted at me. "The Northern Alliance are shooting into Takhta-Pul and the Americans are bombing the centre of the town.''

"Impossible," I said. Takhta-Pul is only 24 miles away, a few minutes ride from the Afghan border town of Spin Boldak. But then a refugee with a cracked face and white hair matting the brow below his brown turban * he looked 70 but said he was only 36 * stumbled up to us. "The Americans just destroyed our homes,'' he cried. "I saw my house disappear. It was a big plane that spat smoke and soaked the ground with fire.''

For a man who couldn't read and had never left Kandahar province in all his life, it was a chilling enough description of the Spectre, the American "bumble bee'' aircraft that picks off militiamen and civilians with equal ferocity. And down the tree-lined road came hundreds more refugees * old women with dark faces and babies carried in the arms of young women in burqas and boys with tears on their faces * all telling the same stories.

Mullah Abdul Rahman slumped down beside me, passed his hand over the sweat on his face and told me how his brother * a fighter in the same town * had just escaped. "There was a plane that shot rockets out of its side,'' he said, shaking his head. "It almost killed my brother today. It hit many people.''

So this is what it's like to be on the losing side in the American-Afghan bloodbath. Everywhere it was the same story of desperation and terror and courage. An American F-18 soared above us as a middle-aged man approached me with angry eyes. "This is what you wanted, isn't it?'' he screamed. "Sheikh Osama is an excuse to do this to the Islamic people.''

I pleaded with yet another Taliban fighter * a 35-year-old man with five children called Jamaldan * to honour his government's promise to get me to Kandahar. He looked at me pityingly. "How can I get you there,'' he asked, "when we can hardly protect ourselves?''

The implications are astonishing. The road from the Iranian border town of Zabul to Kandahar has been cut by Afghan gunmen and US special forces. The Americans were bombing civilian traffic and the Taliban on the road to Spin Boldak, and Northern Alliance troops were firing across the highway. Takhta-Pul was under fire from American guns and besieged by the Alliance. Kandahar was being surrounded.

No wonder I found the local Taliban commander, the thoughtful and intelligent Mullah Haqqani, preparing to cross the Pakistani border to Quetta * for "medical reasons''.

Kandahar may not be the Taliban Stalingrad * not yet * but tragedy was the word that came to mind. Out of a dust-storm came a woman in a grey shawl. "I lost my daughter two days ago,'' she wailed. "The Americans bombed our home in Kandahar and the roof fell on her.'' Amid the chaos and shouting, I did what reporters do. Out came my notebook and pen. Name? "Muzlifa.'' Age? "She was two.'' I turn away. "Then there was my other daughter.'' She nods when I ask if this girl died too. "At the same moment. Her name was Farigha. She was three.'' I turn away. "There wasn't much left of my son.'' Notebook out for the third time. "When the roof hit him, he was turned to meat and all I could see were bones. His name was Sherif. He was a year and a half old.''

They came out of a blizzard of sand, these people, each with their story of blood. Shukria Gul told her story more calmly. Beneath her burqa, she sounded like a teenager. "My husband Mazjid was a labourer. We have two children, our daughter Rahima and our son Talib. Five days ago, the Americans hit a munitions dump in Kandahar and the bullets came through our house. My husband was killed. He was 25.''

At the Akhtar Trust refugee camp, I found Dr Ismael Moussa, just up from Karachi, a doctor of theology dispensing religion along with money for widows. "The Americans have created an evil for themselves," he said. "And it will pay for this. The Almighty Lord allows a respite to an oppressor, enough rope to hang itself, until He seizes him and never lets go.''

Seizing, it seems, was also on the mind of the Foreign Office, earnestly warning reporters that Taliban invitations to Kandahar were a trap to kidnap foreign journalists. Given the politeness of even the most desperate Taliban yesterday, this may fit into the "interesting-if-true" file. Dr Moussa suggested a more disturbing reason: the desire to prevent foreign correspondents witnessing in Kandahar the kind of war crimes committed by Britain's friends in the Northern Alliance at the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif.

As for Mullah Najibullah, the Taliban's only foreign ministry representative this side of Kandahar, he looked tired and deeply depressed, admitting he had left Spin Boldak the previous night and had not slept since. But Kandahar was calm, he claimed. The Taliban's Islamic elders continued to stay there. Later, he admitted that all Taliban men had been ordered to leave Spin Boldak on Saturday night for fear that Alliance gunmen would invade the camps disguised as refugees.

"Only God Almighty has allowed the Muslims to continue to fight the great armed might of the United States,'' he added. If he had looked out the window, he would have seen the contrails of the bomber streams heading for Kandahar.

It was an eerie phenomenon. Taliban men * rifles over their shoulders * stared into the sun, up high into the burning light through which four white columns of smoke burnt from jet engines across the sky. I stood behind them and wondered at the battle I had watched for 20 years: a swaying host of eighth-century black turbans and, just behind them, the contrails of a B-52 heading in from Diego Garcia. God against technology.

[SyedA]

go to next one.