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U.S. Inches Towards an Alliance with Taliban's Afghan Enemies
Thursday, September 20, 2001

Daily Telegraph
AMERICA and anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan are edging towards an alliance to defeat their common foe, the foreign minister for the opposition United Front said yesterday.

Speaking from a hilltop command post overlooking the Shamali plains towards Kabul, Dr Abdullah, the chief spokesman for the Islamic State of Afghanistan, said that had Washington offered its support earlier, American lives would have been saved.

Since the weekend, however, contact between America and the military alliance that has been waging war again the Taliban for the last six years has intensified, he revealed. "We became more active," he said. "The US also knows that it is important to continue dialogue."

Asked whose initiative the contact had been, Washington's or the United Front, Dr Abdullah - one of the most influential figures in its leadership - said: "We crossed each other in the middle."

The United Front controls about 10 per cent of Afghanistan, mostly in the mountainous north east, but with pockets in the west as well. Its commanders argue that by holding on to the territory, they are protecting the rest of Central Asia from a Taliban advance north.

Despite the threat of American air strikes, Taliban forces have launched fierce attacks in Takhar in the north in a bid to cut the United Front lines of communication with the aid it receives via the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan.

The United Front could offer America help with intelligence but was also the only force that could put pressure on the Taliban in different parts of the country on the ground, said Dr Abdullah.

Reaching his lair involved a long drive down the staunchly anti-Taliban Panjshir Valley and then past sentries lining a windswept hill facing south towards the capital.

The view from the command post would have been Elysian were it not for the storms covering the landscape with dust.

Dr Abdullah, a medical physician who was also a close friend of the late Ahmad Shah Massoud, the military commander killed in a suicide bomb attack 10 days ago, was scathing about Pakistan, the Taliban's main foreign backer.

The West's neglect of Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal and its habit of contracting out its policy towards the country to Pakistan had been a disaster, the foreign minister said.

"Now, you have to rely on the corrupt, fanatical Pakistani generals to eradicate this menace," he said. "I wish you good luck."
(More: Daily Telegraph News Source)

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