Afghans accuse Pakistan of supporting Taliban

Mojaddadi accuses Pakistan of supporting Taliban

KABUL: The head of Afghanistan’s reconciliation commission accused forces in Pakistan Sunday of propping up a deadly insurgency being waged in the name of loyalists of the Taliban government ousted four years ago.

The neighbouring country helped to create the fundamentalist Taliban in the early 1990s and elements in it were still providing militants with weapons to “destroy us”, Sebghatullah Mojaddadi told reporters. He was responding to a question about his reference at a national reconciliation conference Saturday to “foreign hands” he said were employing and equipping people to carry out attacks in Afghanistan.

“We have not seen any direct military interferences except from our Pakistani brothers,” said Mojaddadi, who briefly served as president in 1992. “I don’t know why they have not stopped their inhumane interference in Afghanistan so far,” he said.

While President Pervez Musharraf might not be directly involved in supporting the militants, other groups such as the country’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and religious schools were, he said.

“Pakistan or its ISI have given them (militants) plans to implement in Afghanistan, have provided them with weapons and facilities and warned them if they do not do it they will be handed over to Americans as Al Qaeda,” he said.

Pakistan was one of only three countries which officially recognised the Taliban’s ultra-Islamic regime but it turned its back on the hardliners after they were ousted in a US-led invasion in late 2001 for not handing over Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden for the September 11 attacks.

Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the September 11 attacks, which killed about 3,000 people.

Islamabad is now a key ally in Washington’s “war on terror” which includes a force of nearly 20,000 US-led troops hunting down Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.

Some of the militants also fled across the border into Pakistan and Pakistan’s military has rounded up scores of them. But Mojaddadi said most of those arrested were Pakistanis and not Afghans.

Pakistan has said it deployed about 70,000 troops along the border with Afghanistan to stop militants from crossing into its rugged tribal region. In a series of operations, Pakistani security forces destroyed hideouts and training camps of militants linked to Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, officials said earlier.

Attacks linked to the Taliban insurgency have killed around 1,400 people, most of them militants, in Afghanistan this year ? up from about 850 last year. afp