KABUL, 17 April 2005 — A leader of Afghanistan’s ousted Taleban movement has rejected as baseless reports that he held reconciliation talks with President Hamid Karzai’s government. Maulavi Abdul Kabir, thought now to be No. 2 in the Taleban hierarchy after its fugitive leader Mulla Mohamad Omar, also dismissed reports of rifts among remnants of the hard-line Islamic movement overthrown by US-led forces in late 2001.
Afghan Chief Justice Fazl Hadi Shinwari said recently that senior Taleban figures, including Kabir, were in touch with him about giving up the insurgency they have waged for the past 3-1/2 years since being driven from power. In an audio message played to Reuters by satellite phone by Taleban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi, Kabir rejected this.
“There have been no talks with the Americans or the current government and whoever has said this, it has no basis,” he said. “As before, the Taleban are under one leadership,” Kabir said, referring to Omar.
Hakimi said the message was recorded on Friday somewhere in Afghanistan. Hakimi said Kabir was now head of the Taleban’s political commission, which would make him Omar’s deputy. Hakimi also said the Taleban were working on a plan to change their tactics away from guerrilla warfare. He said the focus was now on the training suicide bombers to target government officials, foreign forces and aid workers in major cities and to infiltrate agents into security organs to carry out sabotage.
“The change of tactics is an easy way for us to have a longer-term war of attrition and would also not cost many lives for us,” he said, while denying that the Taleban would be copying the tactics of insurgents in Iraq. US-led troops toppled the Taleban after they refused to hand over Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, architect of Sept. 11.
An 18,300-strong US-led force is still hunting the militants but Bin Laden and Omar remain at large. Karzai has said his government is in contact with Taleban members to try to persuade them to lay down their arms and abandon a bloody insurgency that has claimed more than 1,000 lives in the past two years.
However, the government has stressed the amnesty offer would not be open to about 150 Taleban figures responsible for “terrorist” attacks or linked to Al-Qaeda. Kabir served as the Taleban’s top military commander in the east of Afghanistan during the group’s rule. According to Afghan sources, he played a big role in providing safe passage in 2001 for senior Al-Qaeda figures, including bin Laden, who had been trapped by US-led forces in the Tora Bora Mountains after the Taleban’s fall.
At a news conference in Kabul on Saturday, Lt. Gen. David Barno, commander of US-led forces in Afghanistan, said the Taleban were “desperate” but still “dangerous”. While a reconciliation program was beginning to show a lot of potential success, Al-Qaeda was still providing the Taleban with finance and training, which meant a small number of extremists would continue to wage the insurgency.
Meanwhile, Afghan police and counter-narcotic forces arrested four drug traffickers who were transporting some 200 kilograms (440 pounds) of narcotics through Kabul yesterday, an official said. Interior Ministry spokesman Lutfullah Mashal said the men were arrested during a pre-dawn raid. More than 70 kilograms of heroin and 120 kilograms of opium, the raw ingredient of heroin, were seized during the raid, Mashal said.
Mashal said the men were driving a truck from the eastern province of Nangarhar, one of the main drug-producing regions in the war-torn country before being arrested near a checkpoint east of Kabul. Afghanistan produces almost 90 percent of the world’s opium. The United States and the United Nations have both warned it is on the brink of becoming a narco-state.
