KABUL, 8 September 2003 — Afghan President Hamid Karzai yesterday said he hoped for results from Pakistan’s promise to step up efforts against Taleban militants crossing into Afghanistan to carry out attacks.
Karzai said his counterpart Pervez Musharraf had promised that Pakistan would do all it could to stop “terrorist” activities along the border.
“We are hoping that this cooperation would increase further between Afghanistan and Pakistan and also with the United States,” he told reporters at a joint press conference with visiting US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
“We believe that a joint fight against terrorism between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the United States and the rest of the region is entirely ... in the interests of all the countries and international peace. “We are hopeful that the stricter approach by Pakistan against the Taleban incursions into Afghanistan, against terrorism would produce the desired results,” he said.
Southeast Afghanistan has been hit by a wave of violence blamed on resurgent Taleban, who continue to launch attacks 22 months after the hard line regime was toppled by a US-led assault.
“We are definitely concerned about the increased activity of the Taleban on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border,” Karzai said, referring to recent attacks which have left dozens of people dead.
Afghan officials regularly blame attacks on militants crossing the rugged and porous border with Pakistan.
Around 100 suspected Taleban have been killed in a week-long offensive by US and Afghan troops in the mountains of southeast Zabul province.
Rumsfeld said there was a possibility of the Kabul-based International Security Assistance Force peacekeepers being expanded into the troubled provinces.
“I would add however that in the last analysis, the security in Afghanistan is the responsibility of the Afghan people,” he said.
“The presence of foreign forces is a helpful thing for a period. It is an important thing for a period but it is an anomaly; it is not a natural circumstance and no country wants foreign forces in their country interminably,” he said.
A 12,500-strong US-led coalition force is currently hunting remnants of the Taleban and its Al-Qaeda allies, mainly along the rugged Afghan-Pakistan border.
Man Kills Wife, Five Others
in Remote Village
A husband angered by the refusal of his estranged wife to live with him stormed her parents’ house in a remote Pakistani village and allegedly shot dead her and five others early yesterday. Before dawn, Bashir Ahmed, 48, and nine of his friends burst into the parents’ home in Kot Sadaat village in central Pakistan and gunned down his wife Faizan, her parents, two of their children and a guest, police said.
Chaudhry Munir Ahmed, the deputy superintendent of police in the nearby city of Vehari, said the victims were sleeping in the courtyard of the home when they were sprayed with bullets. Many poor villagers sleep outdoors during the summer. Vehari lies about 130 kilometers northeast of Multan. No one has been arrested for the shootings.
Faizan, who like many Pakistani women uses a single name, and her three daughters had been living with her parents for the past three years since her husband married a second woman. Ahmed had tried to get his wife to come back to his home after the second wife left him, but Faizan refused, police said.
