NATO Commander Pushes For Action on Taliban in Pakistan
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
KABUL, Afghanistan — NATO’S commander in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General David Richards, arrived in Islamabad yesterday for urgent talks with Pakistani military and intelligence services to ask what they intend to do about Taliban sanctuaries in their country. The British general, who leads 31,000 troops, will meet President Musharraf of Pakistan today and will also seek help on capturing the Taliban leadership operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Before leaving Kabul, General Richards painted a dire picture, saying that if reconstruction in the country did not seriously start by the winter, 70% of Afghans could switch sides and join the Taliban. He said he wanted “partnership and co-operation rather than confrontation” with Pakistan. Key items on the agenda will be the alleged presence of the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar in Quetta, the capital of the Pakistan province of Baluchistan, and the recent deal between the Pakistani military and the Taliban in a major tribal area.
His visit coincides with a U.N. report stating that five Taliban command and control centers are running the insurgency and operating with widespread use of “safe havens outside the country.”
They include a Taliban command active in Afghanistan’s northeastern provinces, an eastern command and a southern command, as well as separate fronts established by two Taliban allies, the veteran warlords Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani.
Although the U.N.does not allege that all these fronts are based in Pakistan, NATO and American intelligence place both Haqqani and Hekmetyar as well as Mullah Mohammed Omar in Pakistan.
“The leadership relies heavily on cross-border fighters, many of whom are Afghans drawn from nearby refugee camps and radical seminaries in Pakistan,” the U.N. report says.
“They are trained and paid to serve as medium-level commanders, leading operations inside Afghanistan, and are able to retreat back to safe havens outside the country,” it adds. However, the report says: “The foot soldiers of the insurgency are Afghans recruited within Afghanistan.”
General Richards and the head of American forces in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, told the Daily Telegraph that, since the military signed the deal September 5,militant attacks in eastern Afghanistan had surged by 300%.
