KABUL/BONN, 2 December — Afghanistan may or may not have a broad-based government but it will not be Burhanuddin Rabbani who will head it.
This became clear yesterday as US-backed opposition forces closed in on the Taleban’s last stronghold. Northern Alliance leader Rabbani’s exile government was holding Afghanistan’s UN seat even when the Taleban controlled 95 percent of the country. But yesterday Alliance’s Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah ruled out the possibility of Rabbani or anyone else from his faction leading the next government.
On the military front, US bombers and Pashtun tribesmen clawed at the Taleban’s last bastion of Kandahar. Tribal fighters captured part of Kandahar airport from the Taleban and Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda force after a day of fierce American airstrikes. “Gul Agha and Gul Fida Muhammad’s troops have entered the airport area and at this time fighting is continuing,” Khalid Pashtoon, a spokesman for Gul Agha, said. Tribesmen now controlled the side of the airport near a main road, while the Taleban held the other side edging the desert.
On the fifth and possibly final day of a UN-sponsored conference in Bonn delegates from the main anti-Taleban factions pledged to strike a deal to create a broad-based government and drag Afghanistan out of civil war. A last-minute split in the most powerful faction, the Northern Alliance, threatened to derail the conference but, amid intense international pressure, delegates vowed to override foot-dragging by its old guard in Kabul.
“We want to stand with our people, not with personalities,” said Yunus Qanuni, head of the Alliance delegation, sending a signal that ousted President Burhanuddin Rabbani would not have a veto on the peace deal.
In Kabul the Northern Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah said that Rabbani would not lead the proposed interim regime. Abdullah added that the Northern Alliance, also known as the United Front, did not expect to name one of its own members to lead the interim council. The head “will not be necessarily from the United Front,” he said, sidestepping a question on the role of former Afghan King Muhammad Zahir Shah, who is favored by the international community to act as figurehead for the new power-sharing government.
Qanuni earlier said that the alliance might agree a deal irrespective of Rabbani’s view. “In the event that Ustad (Rabbani) does not agree, we will refer to public opinion,” Qanuni said, implying that the powerful delegation would act on its own.
The UN special representative for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Ibrahimi, earlier rejected an Alliance appeal for a 10-day adjournment of the talks and appealed in a telephone call to Rabbani to resolve the deadlock.
The ink was not yet dry on a deal, and negotiations are still ongoing over the hotly contested seats on a Cabinet-style executive council, but behind the scenes in Bonn diplomats were making frantic efforts to wrap up the talks. The supreme council would be composed of 50 members from the Northern Alliance, 50 exiled royalists of the Rome-based former king and 20 members of two other smaller Afghan groups representing exiled leaders.
The United Nations hopes their route-map to representative government — which would see an interim regime preparing a new constitution and elections — will prevent the rival factions falling back into conflict.
US warplanes kept up what witnesses said was a relentless bombardment of Kandahar as a large deployment of US Marines stepped up their hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Abdullah said he believed Osama Bin Laden was on the run in southern Afghanistan, not in caves near the eastern city of Jalalabad where US forces have been focusing their search. “I believe some of his lieutenants are in Tora Bora, but not Bin Laden himself,” Abdullah told a news conference, saying he thought the Al-Qaeda leader was on the move in southern mountains.
Witnesses arriving at the Pakistani border at Chaman said US B-52 bombers had mounted heavy raids through the night around Kandahar and the border smugglers’ town of Spin Boldak. The Afghan Islamic Press quoted former Taleban ambassador to Pakistan Abdul Salaam Zaeef as saying Taleban fighters had shot down a US plane in the afternoon. “The plane fell almost two km south of the airport and American planes kept on bombing (the airport),” he said.
The US military denied the report. “All of our aircraft are accounted for,” Marine Corps Maj. Ralph Mills, spokesman for the US Central Command in Tampa, Fla., said.
Another Taleban official, Maulvi Aminullah, was quoted in a Pakistani newspaper claiming that five US Special Forces soldiers had been killed in a suicide attack. The Taleban’s commander of frontier affairs told the Baluchistan Times that the five were killed during an attack in which five Taleban died near an airstrip about 20 kilometers (12 miles) out of Kandahar city. There was no immediate US comment on the latest claim.
Opposition Pashtun leader Ahmed Karzai said the top dozen or so commanders around Mullah Omar should expect no mercy if they are captured or choose to surrender. “Some people have no chance,” he said. “If I were to give them amnesty, there would be two million other people who would want to kill them. Not even the United States would be able to save them. They are the ones who did all the killing.”
Karzai, brother of Hamid Karzai who has been rallying royalist Pashtun tribesmen against the Taleban for weeks, said among those facing certain death if captured were top Taleban commanders Hafiz Majid and Mullah Saleh Muhammad. Most hard-core Taleban, including government ministers, had already fled the city, he added.
Meanwhile, the Taleban handed over a Canadian reporter, who went missing earlier this week, at the Pakistani border, a Pakistani border official said.
