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Afghanistan
Bombs Aim to Put Heat on Taliban and Pakistan
2001-10-22
  • Ever since it reluctantly agreed to support American military operations against Afghanistan, Pakistan has been insisting that the Taliban government not be toppled before Pakistan has had time to construct a "broad-based government" capable of taking over. In Afghanistan's turbulent history, whoever controls Kabul usually controls the country, so it has been in Pakistan's interest to see that the Northern Alliance not get the chance to overrun the capital. In deference to Pakistan, American bombing since Oct. 7 has been carefully calibrated to exclude the Taliban's lines north of Kabul. American officials were also dispatched to tell alliance commanders that they should not mount a full-scale offensive on Kabul until Pakistan's maneuvering produced a viable formula for a new government.

    One result has been to put the United States in the contradictory position of striking the Taliban in four other Afghan cities — Jalalabad, Kandahar, Herat and Mazar-i- Sharif — while in effect sparing them from defeat in Kabul. But American officials in Pakistan have grown impatient. According to Pakistani and American officials, Pakistan has been prodding an array of Afghan groups to come up with a formula for a new government with the Northern Alliance, which represents Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara minorities in Afghanistan. The groups have included allegedly moderate elements of the Taliban, representatives of the exiled former Afghan king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, and Pashtun tribal chiefs from southern and eastern Afghanistan.

    But talks between those groups in Islamabad have bogged down, and some American officials suspect that Pakistan's powerful military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, of manipulating the talks to ensure that Taliban elements retain a decisive hand. A case in point has been Maulvi Jalaluddin Haqqani, the Taliban's top army commander, who spent several days last week in Islamabad. While Pakistan has represented Maulvi Haqqani as a moderate, American intelligence officials who have known him since his days as a guerrilla commander against occupying Soviet forces say he is an anti- American Islamic hard-liner who joined the Taliban out of conviction, not expediency. "Haqqani had a reputation as a commander who was brutal even by the standards that characterized that conflict," one senior American intelligence official said. "Haqqani is no moderate."
    • Posted by:Fred Pruitt

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