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Pakistan sends team to meet with Taliban
©New York Times
© St. Petersburg Times, ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Pakistan said Thursday that it would send a top general and several of the country's most militant Islamic clerics to Afghanistan today in a last-ditch effort to persuade the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, to hand over Osama bin Laden and spare Afghanistan a U.S. military attack. Pakistan's military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, ordered military aircraft to bring an improbable team to the Afghan city of Kandahar. The team includes the army's intelligence chief, Gen. Mahmoud Ahmed, and several Muslim clerics who only a week ago were disdained by Musharraf in a television broadcast as representing an isolated minority of Islamic militants in this country of 140-million people. The mission is a measure of how desperately Pakistan wants to avoid being drawn into backing a U.S. military thrust into Afghanistan. Officials said their task would be to "discuss ways in which the Taliban can be saved" from a U.S. attack, namely by agreeing to a formula that would allow bin Laden to be handed over to face charges that he is responsible for a series of terrorist attacks around the world, including the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The Muslim clerics, according to the New York Times, were going to tell Omar, the village prayer leader who is the Taliban's supreme leader, that continuing to harbor bin Laden would injure the cause of Islam everywhere. The mission comes at a moment when Taliban leaders are faced with possible signs of an erosion of their political power. A flurry of recent reports has suggested that chaos is sweeping the country as vast numbers of Afghans flee their homes ahead of possible U.S. military strikes and that the turmoil has begun to weaken the Taliban's hold on the 90 percent of Afghanistan they control. Reports have also suggested that some powerful blocs within the Taliban may be having second thoughts about taking on the U.S. military. Because the Taliban expelled the last Western reporters from Afghanistan last week, the reports are sketchy if not contradictory. But all point to the fact that as cities like Kabul, Jalalabad and Kandahar empty, what little government the Taliban have provided, besides all-pervasive army and police forces, is withering, too. The Taliban, including clerics, soldiers, and government officials, appear to be evaporating from the cities like many of their fellow Afghans. Some reports Thursday from Afghan journalists with close ties to the Taliban suggested that the sudden disappearance of Taliban members who were stationed at checkpoints in the cities or whose pickup trucks roared through the streets, bristling with weapons, was an ominous sign. They said the Taliban fighters were being dispersed in case of U.S. air attacks or moved from the cities to strengthen defenses elsewhere. In any case, the sudden changes have brought some surprising alterations to life for some Afghans. A report relayed from Jalalabad on Thursday, for example, suggested that the fear normally spread by one of the Taliban's most repressive agencies, the religious police, has dissipated as their offices have been all but shut down. People have been playing music again, an act that could draw a penalty of a lashing or worse ever since the Taliban swept to power in Jalalabad in 1996. The move by Musharraf to send some of Pakistan's most militant clerics to Kandahar came as the Taliban leadership admitted, indirectly, that they know where bin Laden is hiding, or at least that they know how to reach him. In an interview Thursday with Reuters in Kabul, the Taliban information minister, Mullah Qudrutullah Jamal, said the Taliban "believed" a message sent to bin Laden by courier had reached him at an undisclosed location. However, Jamal gave no hint of where bin Laden was or even if he was in Afghanistan, and it was possible that his remarks were only the latest in efforts to buy time during the crisis. Ever since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Muslim clerics who are the Taliban's voice to the world have been engaging in sideways shifts and about-faces on bin Laden, saying at first that his whereabouts were known to the Taliban, then that they were not. On Monday, Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan -- now the last country in the world to recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government -- said bin Laden was "missing, but not lost" and "in some place hiding." Zaeef said he had no idea where that hideout might be. The message purportedly given to bin Laden was a religious decree, or fatwa, that a gathering of several hundred high-ranking Taliban clerics approved at an emergency gathering in Kabul last week. In the decree, the clerics ordained that Omar, their supreme leader, should "encourage Osama bin Laden to leave Afghanistan of his own free will, in the shortest possible time, and choose any other place for himself." After initially wavering over whether the decree had been delivered to bin Laden or not, Zaeef said on Monday that Omar, exercising his overarching authority, had made a "final decision" that bin Laden would not be surrendered and not be asked to leave. But Thursday, the information minister in Kabul offered a new twist. "The edict had to be delivered by a messenger," he said, according to the Reuters account. "It's not like we can pick up the telephone and talk to Osama, or fax a message to him. He has no such facilities, so the message had to be sent through a messenger who probably took some time to find him." He added: "We believe that by now he has found Osama and delivered the fatwa to him."
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From the Times wire desk
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