Asia Times: Taliban's trail leads to Pakistan


	December 13, 2001	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

Taliban's trail leads to Pakistan
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - The former director-general of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Lieutenant-General Hamid Gul, nicknamed the "godfather of the Taliban", is believed to be behind moves to help the Taliban establish a base in Pakistan's autonomous Pashtun tribal belt, which borders eastern Afghanistan.

Already, many Pashtun Taliban are believed to have settled in the tribal areas following their hasty withdrawals from first Mazar-e-Sharif, Kabul and then Kandahar.

It is believed that the Taliban will split into a number of wings in order to establish political clout in the tribal area. One group, comprising diplomats and some lower-ranked ministers in the previous Afghanistan government, has already announced in a press conference as having split from the Taliban, but it refused to condemn either Taliban leader Mullah Omar or Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network.

It is said that this is a ploy to obtain a foothold in the Pakistani border city of Peshawar, and later the Afghan capital Kabul, before rejoining a revived Taliban mainstream movement. By settling in the tribal belt, the Taliban would be able to harass any foreign troops that might be stationed in Afghanistan.

Sources say that United States authorities have already asked Pakistani intelligence agencies to keep an eye on Gul's activities, and have requested that he be jointly interrogated by ISI and US intelligence agencies. However, because of his high profile and the ripples it would cause in the Pakistan army, this is unlikely to happen, even though the government of President General Pervez Musharraf has pledged its full support to the US in its war on terror.

Gul headed the ISI from 1987 to 1989. He remained responsible for Afghan affairs until his forced retirement in 1992 after a fallout with then premier Nawaz Sharif. Gul is widely considered the architect of the Afghan jihad - the man who, with financial and logistical support from the Central Intelligence Agency - engineered the fight of the mujahideen against the Soviet Union and its proxy government in Kabul in the 1980s.

Following his retirement, Gul remained close to Afghan groups and when the previously unknown Taliban emerged in 1994 in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, he said that he saw hope that they would restore peace in the country and offered them his military and political advice.

Gul is widely on record as saying that bin Laden is innocent of the September attacks on New York and Washington, which he says were an Israeli-engineered attempt at a coup against the government of the US.

Although certain pro-Islamabad tribal chiefs and political agents (who are appointed by the central government) have vowed that if bin Laden flees to Pakistan they will hand him over to Pakistani authorities, they will not dare to oust Taliban leaders from their administered areas because of the overwhelming public support the area has for the Taliban.

In an attempt to help stem the flight of Taliban troops into Pakistani territory, on Monday Pakistani helicopters dropped soldiers on mountain peaks as thousands of army and paramilitary troops fanned out along the border. Pakistan shares a 1,344-mile border with Afghanistan. The government had won approval on Sunday from tribal elders in the region to send a federal force to the porous frontier. The army movement was the first time federal forces have received permission from tribal elders to enter the area.

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld expressed concern on Tuesday that Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders could escape justice. "It's a very complicated area to try to seal and there's just no way you can put a perfect cork in the bottle," he told a Pentagon briefing in reference to the rugged Tora Bora.

Indeed, there is much confusion over exactly what is going on in the mountains, where a diehard band of Al-Qaeda fighters, and possibly bin Laden, are encircled by Northern Alliance troops and under intense US bombing. The trapped forces on Wednesday morning missed a deadline to disarm and reportedly made new demands for their surrender.

Whatever happens, though, the outcome could have repercussions on Pakistan, which the US has already unofficially marked as a "terrorist sanctuary".

According to sources who shuttle between Jalalabad in Afghanistan and Peshawar every week, and who have deep connections in the area, when the Taliban retreated from Jalalabad they handed over control to one of their main sympathizers, Maulvi Yunus Khalis, but he was not able to retain it. The former warlords Haji Qadeer and Haji Zaman, who had been holed up in Peshawar, and Malik Hazrat Ali, who had been living in a refugee camp, immediately rushed to Afghanistan and forcibly took control of Jalalabad.

After the Taliban's sudden retreat, some of the Arab fighters handed over their children and families to Afghan friends for their safety, and moved on with the Taliban to other places. Some of the families traveled to neighboring provinces, where they were given shelter by local commanders. However, a few of the families were stranded in Jalalabad.

When Malik Hazrat Ali - also a renowned drug lord - took charge of Jalalabad as "police chief", he went in search of the Arabs and their belongings. In one instance, he killed two Arab children who were sheltering with an Afghan friend. In these circumstances, as many as 100 Arab families had no option but to take shelter in the Tora Bora cave complex.

Haji Zaman and Malik Hazrat Ali then convinced US authorities that bin Laden and hundreds of his supporters were also holed up in the caves. They also told the US authorities that the cave complex is extensive and that the US would not be able to track down bin Laden without their local support - for which they are believed to have been very handsomely paid in US dollars.

But contrary to the claims of the local commanders that the complex is "miles long", according to sources well acquainted with the location, the Tora Bora caves are not very sophisticated, in fact they are ordinary tunnels, but they have several exit points into different provinces, including Logar, Khost and Paktia. And importantly, one of the exits is in the Pakistani border area of Parachanar, a tribal-administered region.

The sources say that the warlords have deliberately played up the complex nature of the caves for their own benefit, in the process fooling much of the media, as well as the US, that bin Laden is still there. The chances are, though, that when the caves are finally bared, bin Laden will long have left - raising the awkward suspicion that he has taken the route with the exit into Pakistan.

This would give the US the pretext, though, along with the Pakistani authorities, to launch operations into the tribal belt - and perhaps nip any re-emergence of the Taliban in the bud.

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