SPIN BOLDAK, Afghanistan, 21 January 2005 — Taleban supreme leader Mulla Omar has spurned a dialogue offer by the Afghan government and ruled out reconciliation as long as foreign troops remain in the country, Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) reported yesterday. In a message coinciding with Eid Al-Adha, Omar vowed to continue “jihad (holy war) which is the only way for liberation of Afghanistan from foreign occupation”.
“We don’t see any need for talks, neither do we know which moderate Taleban the Afghan government is talking to, we would like to know who these people are posing as moderate Taleban,” Omer said. He described the dialogue offer as “sham and baseless”.
Omar’s message was faxed to reporters by Taleban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi. The message said holy war was the only way to ensure the rights of Muslims and that talk of dialogue with the US-backed government of President Hamid Karzai was false.
“We want to make it clear to the aggressor forces and their puppet (Karzai) government that the Taleban are not ready for any dialogue while there is even a single aggressor soldier in the country,” the message said.
Meanwhile, renegade Pushtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar also issued a three-page message, urging Afghans to begin uprising against “occupied forces and puppet government”.
“Achieving freedom is not a hot cake but it demands sacrifices and those who don’t follow this always remain in slavery,” he said. Hekmatyar and Omar have been on the run since the fall of the Taleban regime in November, 2001 and are suspected of hiding in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region along with Al-Qaeda kingpin Osama Bin Laden.
Earlier this month, the US government placed an advertisement in Pakistan’s Urdu language newspaper Jang listing the “most-wanted terrorists”, including Bin Laden and Omar, and offering millions of dollars for information leading to their arrest.
The governor of the southeastern Afghan province of Paktia said this week hundreds of Taleban fighters could abandon their insurgency as a result of talks under way between local commanders and the government via tribal intermediaries.
Assadullah Wafa declined to identify those he said were willing to stop fighting, but said the group he was in contact with consisted of both senior and ordinary Taleban members.
The report came after US ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad last month pledged an amnesty to rank and file guerrillas if they were to lay down their arms, but ruled out compromise with hard-line leaders guilty of major crimes. On Sunday, US forces freed 81 suspected Taleban fighters from military jails across the country in an apparent bid to encourage the peace initiative.
Meanwhile, aggressive moves to destroy Afghanistan’s opium fields would strip many farmers of their livelihood and risk feeding the violent insurgency there, its new anti-narcotics minister warned yesterday. The booming drugs trade in the impoverished state now accounts for 87 percent of the world’s supply of heroin, derived from opium in poppies. Some US officials have urged measures such as aerial spraying to eradicate the crop.
“To take away the livelihood of farmers could pose security problems at this time,” Habibullah Qaderi, Afghan minister for counter-narcotics, told a news briefing before a NATO-hosted seminar in Brussels.
“We will be careful with the eradication. It is in the plan but we have not decided how to do it,” said Qaderi, who was put in charge of a new national anti-narcotics ministry last month. Analysts have warned that farmers will fight any attempt to destroy their fields unless they are assured alternative ways of making a living.
Qaderi said Karzai ruled out aerial spraying because of the risk of damage to other crops and contamination of the water supply to rural areas. “Certainly we need to give more stress to alternative livelihoods. If you want to get rid of the poppies, we need assistance from European countries and from America itself,” he said of international funds offered to farmers to switch from poppies to other crops.
Meanwhile, a NATO official said that the next six months will be crucial for Afghanistan as it faces new elections, but voiced confidence over the expansion of a NATO-led peacekeeping force. Hikmet Cetin, NATO’s top civil representative in Kabul, backed a call for help in weaning the war-scarred country’s economy off of the multi-billion dollar opium trade.
“We can’t have long-term stability without counter-narcotics,” he said after talks with Qaderi. Cetin stressed that upcoming parliamentary elections would be much more complicated than presidential ballots late last year in the country, which is battling to rebuild itself after decades of civil war.
But he reiterated hopes that the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which NATO has commanded since in 2003, will expand into western Afghanistan “in the coming months” and the south in the first half of 2006. ISAF was initially confined to Kabul, but last year expanded into the north as part of a strategy which will ultimately see it in the south and east too, as well as possibly merging with the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom.
