No progress in Taliban hostage talks

Talks Thursday between Afghanistan's Taliban and a South Korean delegation trying to free 19 hostages ended with the militants reporting no progress.The two sides met for three hours in the small town of Ghanzi, south of Kabul, said a Taliban spokesman and a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross that has been facilitating the meetings.Taliban spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi told AFP that representatives of his militant movement had demanded the release of eight Taliban prisoners."But so far our demands have not been accepted and there has been no development in the negotiations," Ahmadi said.A Red Cross official said it was not immediately clear if there would be a new round of discussions on Friday.The Taliban have killed two of the 23 South Korean aid workers they abducted July 19 and threatened to kill more. On Monday they released two women hostages as a "gesture of goodwill."

Pakistan Sends Tribal Leaders to Salvage Truce Broken by Taliban

The government on Monday dispatched a team of tribal elders to meet with leaders of militant groups in Pakistan’s tribal region in an attempt to salvage a fragile peace deal that unraveled in the wake of last week’s siege of the Red Mosque.
The location of the meeting was in North Waziristan’s main town, Miran Shah, an intelligence official told The Associated Press.
The already fractious North-West Frontier Province tribal region was beset over the weekend by bombings and suicide attacks by militants, who have been angered by the assault on the mosque. The death toll exceeded 70, nearly as many as the government said had been killed last week in the Red Mosque standoff in the capital, Islamabad.
Taliban leaders in North Waziristan called off the peace deal over the weekend, after Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, deployed troops to several checkpoints in the region.
Under the truce, signed last September, the military had agreed to pull back to its barracks and take down checkpoints in exchange for a suspension of hostilities from the militants, who agreed to halt cross-border attacks on American and NATO troops in Afghanistan.
Government officials said they would allow tribal elders to enforce the peace deal in return for millions of dollars in financial aid. Critics said all the deak did was let the Taliban and Al Qaeda to regroup and plan attacks inside the country and across the border.
The September agreement was the latest in a series of sometimes contradictory steps taken by the Pakistani government to restore law and order in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, where civilian administration has steadily eroded in recent years.
The Musharraf government has alternately tried to bludgeon, buy off and appease militants operating in the tribal areas, sometimes sacrificing Pakistani troops, and other times negotiating deals with some of the most feared militant commanders, who now appear to have rejected the agreement altogether.
A letter circulated Monday by the Taliban in North Waziristan said the peace pact had been scrapped “in the larger public interest.” It warned the tribal police not to aid military and paramilitary troops, and urged tribal elders not to cooperate with the government.
It also called on local tribesmen to refrain from harming civil servants working for public service departments like health, education and agriculture. “Anyone caught by the Taliban while causing any harm to employees of these departments would be considered thieves, and would be punished publicly,” the letter said.
The government team dispatched to salvage the peace accord was led by Maulana Syed Nek Zaman, a tribal member of Parliament, who met with various militant commanders at a seminary on Monday.
At the same time, Akram Khan Durrani, the chief minister of the North-West Frontier Province, warned at a news conference that any annulment of the peace pact would have dangerous repercussions for the country.
The scuttling of the accord comes as General Musharraf faces mounting troubles, including a backlash from militants and the religious right in the aftermath of the Red Mosque standoff, as well as months of pro-democracy protests from a wide cross-section of Pakistani citizens.
Even before its failure, the peace accord had not brought the security the government intended. American and NATO commanders in Afghanistan say the Taliban continue to use Pakistan’s tribal areas as a rear base. In early June, the United States National Security Council warned that the Taliban had regrouped and reorganized inside Pakistan. That same month, the Interior Ministry warned General Musharraf that the Taliban’s influence was increasingly spreading outside the tribal areas to other parts of the country.
What connection the Taliban or Al Qaeda may have had to the militants holed up in the Red Mosque remains unclear; what is known is that the clerics leading the mosque and its adjoining seminary had been agitating for Taliban-style rule in Pakistan.
They had also long enjoyed the support of the government. But they became an embarrassment for the Musharraf administration after they sent vice squads across the capital, most recently kidnapping several Chinese nationals who worked in an acupuncture clinic that the seminary students said was a brothel.
The eight-day siege of the mosque and its adjacent seminary for women and girls ended Wednesday after intense fighting for more than 36 hours between Pakistani special forces and the militants. The military put the death toll at 76.
Government officials have said in recent days that they suspect that the dead included foreign fighters. The government has also repeatedly said the fighters surrounded themselves with civilian hostages, but furnished no details.

Taliban Still have access to Soviet-era weapons

While United States officials accuse Iran of arming a resurgent Taliban, officials here say the weapons are actually part of vast caches left behind by the Soviet army that fought a nine-year war in Afghanistan before withdrawing in 1988.Ustad Basir Arifi, secretary for the Disarmament of Illegal Armed Groups (DIAG) programme in northern Afghanistan, told the news agency that weapons abandoned by the Soviet Union there are now being moved by professional smugglers to the southern provinces where the Taliban movement has its stronghold.“Huge caches of weapons remained with the people from the Soviet Union period. These are now being smuggled to the south of Afghanistan. These weapons are bought in the north of Afghanistan and smuggled to the south to be used against government and foreign forces,” Arifi said.According to Arifi, security officials have on several occasions intercepted weapons being smuggled to the south. He said the DIAG has urged the government to take firm measures to avoid all this.Abdul Aziz Ahmad Zai, the chief of DIAG, said his group was “very concerned over the issue. It shows that the Taliban are being fortified”.Zai did not rule out the possibility of weapons originating from outside Afghanistan. “Smugglers could be bringing weapons from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to the north. A good transit point could be Badakhshan province,” he said without mentioning Iran.Zai said powerful syndicates were carrying out the smuggling. “However, our security officials and the interior ministry are working very actively in this regard,” he added.According to Zai, the recent riots in northern Jowzjan province were an indicator of the fact that weapons were freely available to people. He also said that there still were armed groups in the north of Afghanistan. “It is a very great concern for us that there are lots of illegal armed groups in the north,” he said.Gen. Abdul Manan, representative of the defence ministry in the DIAG programme, said the government has been able to collect 70,000 heavy and light weapons from the whole country under the DDR and DIAG programmes. But he believes that at least a million more pieces were in the hands of armed groups in the north.A gun smuggler operating from the Balkh province district told the news agency that he has been in the business for the last two years. The Pashto-speaking, bearded man said he regularly comes to the north to buy different kinds of weapons. “I have employed people to collect weapons from people who have them and these are ferried to the south.” “I have my customers in Qandhar. When the weapons reach there, they come and receive it. I make good profit. I can buy an AK47 for $200 in the north and sell it for $400 in the south,” he added. Occasionally he smuggles explosives as well.Ahmad Shah, 45, a resident of Chemtal district in the Balkh province, freely admitted to supplying the smugglers with guns. “I earn my living through running this business,” he told the news agency.Atta Mohammad Nur, the governor of Balkh province, neither accepts nor rejects the fact that the weapons are being smuggled to the south. “It could be right. Insurgents are doing their utmost to disrupt life in the country. They could be smuggling weapons from north to the south,” he said. Rohullah Samun, spokesman for the Jowzjan governor, accepts that vast amount of weapons still exist in the province. “People do have weapons. There are lots of illegal armed militias in Jowzjan and its neighbouring provinces. Some of the warlords are regrouping,” he said. The reference was to Abdorrashid Dostum, one of Afghanistan’s most formidable warlords. Dostum, who once supported the Soviets, has had a hand in the many regime changes that this war-torn country has seen over the last three decades and retains enormous influence in Jowzjan.Dostum was among leaders who helped the US-led forces to overthrow the Taliban government in 2001. Until recently he was regarded as the strongman of the north, but his role has been reduced to that of being a military adviser to Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai.On June 13, US Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns told CNN television in Paris that there was “irrefutable evidence” that Iran was supplying weapons to the Taliban.Ironically, the Taliban owe their origins largely to Mujahideen that were once armed and backed by the US against communist rule in Afghanistan and the Soviet occupation.