-Caveat Lector- http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/04/international/asia/04STAN.html ?todaysheadlines=&pagewanted=print
October 4, 2001 Reports Swirl Out of Afghanistan of Panic and Taliban Defections By JOHN F. BURNS SLAMABAD, Pakistan, Oct. 3 � The Taliban's top Islamic clerics have left their headquarters in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar to escape the risk of American bombing, and other senior Taliban officials have fled to Pakistan or sent their families across the border as refugees, according to reliable accounts reaching Pakistan. Other accounts depict gathering panic among the population and the disappearance from major cities of many Taliban soldiers and policemen, and raise the possibility of a mass defection by Taliban fighters. The accumulating signs could indicate the beginning of a wider disintegration of Taliban power. But because the reports are scattered, and in some cases from refugees arriving in Pakistan who are hostile to the Taliban, it is uncertain whether the Taliban are starting to break up as a governing force or are regrouping for a guerrilla war. A top official of the anti-Taliban alliance based in northern Afghanistan said today that dozens of senior Taliban officers commanding as many as 10,000 troops might be willing to switch loyalties, some of them based in key provinces. "They are willing to change sides today or wait until something starts and then coordinate their efforts with us," said the official, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, who is nominally the foreign minister of the Northern Alliance. "It's quite possible there will be a popular uprising in Kabul before we can move forces into Kabul." He also claimed to have received pledges of continuing support from Iran and Russia, and to have held his first meeting with American officials. "We are discussing every aspect of the present situation and cooperation," he said, without disclosing the meeting's location. The alliance, which has fought a long and losing war against the Taliban, has a reputation for exaggerating its claims. There was no way to tell whether Dr. Adbullah was overstating the extent to which Taliban fighters could be tempted into a mass defection � a development that would dramatically alter the strategic landscape in the country. Other alliance commanders suggested Dr. Abdullah was making exaggerated claims. But the statements together with the flurry of reports that have leaked out of the isolated country in the past 48 hours � from Afghan cities hundreds of miles apart, as well as from provincial towns that have been fortresses of Taliban power � suggest that tensions building since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States are reaching a breaking point. With the Taliban leaders refusing to hand over Osama bin Laden, named by the United States as the "prime suspect" in the attacks, many within the Taliban's ranks appear to have concluded that war with the United States is inevitable. United Nations officials and refugees say looting of shops and homes has begun. In Kandahar, Taliban fighters have stormed into a United Nations compound and driven off with vehicles used in an American- financed program that has been disarming millions of land mines left over from the guerrilla war against Soviet forces in the 1980's. Shops in the capital, Kabul, as well as in Kandahar and the eastern city of Jalalabad have emptied of food. On the streets of all three cities the religious police � notorious for beating women for the most trivial offenses against the Taliban's repressive social codes � are reported to have virtually disappeared. Intelligence agents have burst into homes and arrested anyone who so much as mentions the name of Mohammad Zahir Shah, the exiled Afghan king who has emerged as a possible figurehead for a post-Taliban government, according to some reports. Religious schools that have indoctrinated young Taliban fighters have been closed, and the students sent off to be inducted into the army. But many have joined the flood of refugees heading for Pakistan, only to be pulled from their families at gunpoint and pressed into service in the Taliban's front-line units. Alongside such accounts, claims by the Northern Alliance of large numbers of front-line Taliban field commanders being prepared to defect had echoes elsewhere. In another region crucial to Taliban power, along Afghanistan's eastern border with Pakistan, Taliban commanders in three key provinces that control the southern approaches to Kabul � Paktika, Paktia and Logar � were reported today to have been in contact with opposition groups that have come together in a loose alliance against the Taliban. According to officials in Pakistan's military intelligence agency, mostly tribal chiefs have shown "some interest" in defecting to the new alliance on condition that it be led by the exiled Zahir Shah. These reports, if true, would explain why the Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, has directed several of his diatribes in recent days against the 86-year- old former king, warning him to live out his life in exile in Rome, where he has lived since 1973. Anybody who supports the king or any other anti- Taliban movement, Mullah Omar said in a radio address today, "will be accused of treason," an offense punishable by death. Perhaps the most striking account coming out of Afghanistan, given tonight in a satellite telephone call from an Afghan reporter inside Afghanistan, said that Mullah Omar had left Kandahar for an undisclosed location along with other top Taliban officials and military commanders. The reporter, who has close ties to the Taliban, said the move was being seen by Taliban loyalists as emblematic of Mullah Omar's wiliness as an old anti-Soviet guerrilla fighter girding for the new "holy war" he has proclaimed against American forces. "People see it as a sign of his skill," the reporter said. But other Afghans who have reached Pakistan greeted the development as a sign that the Taliban, always more of a fanatical religious movement than a functioning government, and with only rudimentary communications in the cities and virtually none outside them, could quickly become leaderless � or at least incapable of leading � under the pounding of an American attack. In this view, Mullah Omar, in quitting Kandahar, was leaving ordinary Afghans to face a fate brought on them by the Taliban, one he was not prepared to face himself. "They are hated, hated for what they have done to women, hated for the fear they have spread, hated for the hunger they have brought to people, hated for the way they have distorted Islam, hated for making Afghanistan a base for people like bin Laden who have brought so much misery around the world," one Afghan with relatives still in Kabul said when he heard the news of Mullah Omar's quitting Kandahar today. "So is it it any surprise that they are crumbling now?" In any case, these Afghans said, there were growing signs that Mullah Omar, whose medieval brand of Islam has never sat easily with more modern elements within the Taliban, may no longer be in effective political control of the Taliban, much less able to lead it into war. These signs, they said, pointed to increasing restiveness, or even active dissent, from other Taliban officials who have concluded that war with the United States would obliterate the Taliban and bring new suffering to Afghanistan. Today the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television broadcast what it said was a new call for a holy war against America by Mullah Omar, who demanded that rich Muslims worldwide pay for it. "Merchants and owners of capital, your prime duty is to spend in the way of God," he said. At the same time, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan, gave a remorseful interview to CNN that sounded like a last, desperate plea for America not to attack, appealing more strongly than ever for evidence of Mr. bin Laden's culpability and suggesting circumstances in which the terrorist suspect could be handed over. "This event was very, very bad and very disastrous to the American people, and we condemned that before," Mullah Zaeeef said, adding that "handover is the other option." "We want that, if Osama bin Laden is involved in this action and if this action was a terrorist action," he said. "We know this was un- Islamic and this was a very, very dangerous action and we condemn that. If Osama bin Laden is involved in this action we need to do something." -- Best wishes This is not the end, we will continue to fight. ~Sheikha al-Nisf, on announcement that Kuwait's highest court voted against women's right to vote and hold public office. (Jan 16, 2001) <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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