Kabul | Monday
THE Northern Alliance was under mounting pressure on Monday to form a broad-based government in Afghanistan as the last two major pockets of Taliban resistance in the country were reported negotiating their surrender.
But international interest seemed to draw increasingly testy responses from the new masters of Kabul, flush from a series of military victories that saw a rapid crumbling of their Taliban foes’ five-year hold on power.
The collapse of the Taliban as a political force was confirmed by Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar, who said on Monday that Islamabad no longer recognises the militia government, although it maintains diplomatic ties.
”We have not yet announced any de-recognition of the Taliban government but that does not mean that we continue to recognise it,” he said, saying Islamabad ”would be happy” to deal with future UN-sponsored administration.
”We do not recognise in the meantime a claim by any leader to represent the whole of Afghanistan,” Sattar said.
The country was far from safe, with four people, including three foreign journalists, killed on Monday on the road from the eastern town of Jalalabad to Kabul, according to witnesses. Further details were not immediately available.
Taliban fighters besieged in the northern city of Kunduz offered a conditional surrender and a peaceful transition of power was reportedly under negotiation in the Taliban’s southern stronghold of Kandahar.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell vowed that Osama bin Laden, the main suspect in the September 11 terror attacks that claimed some 5 000 lives in the United States, would be captured, but it was unclear how much help he was getting from the Alliance.
The Alliance’s interior minister Younis Qanooni, who announced on Sunday that they had localised bin Laden at a base 130 kilometers east of Kandahar, was vague on whether the information was being relayed to Washington.
”We’ve been fighting Osama bin Laden and his terrorist al-Qaeda network for the past seven years… The United States has recently joined us in this campaign,” said Qanooni.
”We should ask whether the United States is going to cooperate with us in fighting international terrorism, not the other way around,” he said.
Grumblings began on Sunday among Alliance leaders as they outlined the limits of foreign military presence in post-Taliban Afghanistan.
After the deployment last week of 100 British marines at Bagram air base near Kabul, and French commandos arriving on Monday in Mazar-i-Sharif, Alliance officials warned that foreign troops must play only a humanitarian role.
”We see no need” for more troops of the US-led anti-terror coalition, Qanooni said and defence minister Mohammad Quassim Fahim said the British in Bagram were operating without the agreement of the anti-Taliban alliance.
”The British forces perhaps have an agreement with the UN but not with us,” he said.
UN envoy Francesc Vendrell was scheduled to meet Burhanuddin Rabbani, the UN-recognized president of Afghanistan who was ousted by the Taliban five years ago, to discuss a planned inter-Afghan conference.
Rabbani and the Northern Alliance, of which he is the nominal head, hold most of the cards following the Taliban’s dramatic collapse — and they are playing them close to the chest.
Vendrell has urged the Alliance to meet other factions in a neutral country and Rabbani’s UN representative, Haron Amin, said a delegation should be heading ”hopefully soon” to Europe for an inter-Afghan conference, possibly in Germany.
Since his return to Kabul on Saturday, Rabbani has sought to dispel fears that his return could lead to a repetition of the civil strife and corruption that marked his previous reign, from 1992 to 1996.
”We came to Kabul to call for peace,” he was quoted as saying on Sunday, as pressure mounted for the creation of a representative government that would avoid a repetition of past infighting.
The Northern Alliance is a loose coalition of the country’s Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara and other minorities, and their last experience in power under Rabbani resulted in a bloody civil war that devastated Kabul.
The country’s Pashtun majority is currently represented by the Taliban, and US and UN officials hope the former Afghan king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, also a Pashtun, can play a unifying role despite being 87-years-old and having spent 28 years in exile.
”I think the king plays an important role, a symbolic role,” Powell said on Sunday. ”I don’t want to prejudge what the discussions might lead to, but it seems to me that his role would continue to be symbolic, as opposed to being the executive or the chief executive of the new government.”
But the ex-king’s supporters have been complaining bitterly that the Northern Alliance sidelined them after stunning military victories gave them control of nearly two thirds of the country compared to only one tenth before the October 7 start of the US-led military campaign.
In Tehran, the head of the moderate National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, Pir Sayad Ahmad Gailani, a Pashtun royalist, on Monday joined the calls for ”an early consensus interim government” to avoid internecine disputes.
”An interim government, with the backing of all Afghans, should be put in place at the earliest to rid the country of internal fighting and other disturbances,” Gailani said.
He called for the deployment of ”peace-keeping forces for a short period in big cities like Kabul… under the charter of the United Nations… to restore peace and discipline.”
Hamid Karzai, a top Pashtun leader and a former Afghan deputy foreign minister, said some high-ranking Taliban officials, considered to be moderates, had shown interest in joining efforts to form a new government, but the US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice scotched the idea.
”I don’t think the words ‘moderate’ and ‘Taliban’ go in the same sentence, frankly,” she said on Sunday.
The top Taliban commander in Kunduz, Mullah Fazil, saying US air strikes killed more than 1 000 people in and around the northern city over the weekend, offered to surrender — but only under UN supervision.
”We have authorised the governor of the province to take necessary steps in this respect,” Fazil said in an interview published on Monday in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn.
He said the Taliban would under no circumstances surrender to the Northern Alliance after hearing reports of bloody reprisals after the fall of Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif.
Fazil said their conditions include safe passage home for the fighters, the right to hand their heavy weapons over to neutral caretakers and for foreign fighters — including al-Qaeda troops — to be repatriated through UN auspices.
Estimates of the number of besieged troops at Kunduz run between 20 000 and 30 000, about one third of them foreigners – including Pakistanis, Arabs, Uzbeks and Chechens — linked to bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.
Alliance commander Abdul Rashid Dostam told the BBC on Monday that an Uzbek pro-Taliban guerrilla chief, Djuma Namangani, and 24 of his men died in the fighting in Kunduz.
In Kandahar, the other major pocket of Taliban resistance, militia commanders were reported negotiating with tribal leaders for a peaceful handover of power in the city.
”Soon, as a result of contacts and negotiations, the situation in Kandahar will be peacefully solved,” Karzai said on Sunday. – Sapa-AFP
FEATURES:
Shattered World: A Daily Mail & Guardian special on the attack on the US
OFF-SITE:
Guardian’s Interactive Guide to how a attack involving ground troops may start
The Guardian’s special report on the attacks