[Marxism] Pakistan said to tolerate Taliban refuge, training

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The US attempt to impose by armed force a made-in-USA political
structure on Afghanistan, a long-independent semicolonial country that
(with massive imperialist and Pakistani arms and money) defeated a
ten-year Soviet attempt to occupy the country and determine its
government, is tending to fail in Afghanistan as has been happening in
Iraq.  The specific characteristics of the resistance reflect the
different levels of social, economic, and political development in the
two countries.

And as has happened previously, the failure to stabilize Afghanistan is
drawing Pakistan deeper into the war -- on both sides.

A curiosity is the Taliban fighter's reported statement including Cuba
along with several obvious cases of persecution or oppression of Muslims
in the world.  It is possible that this shows that those running the
jihadi education system are quite sophisticated in their anticommunist
lying, since Cuba has no record at all of jailing or otherwise
persecuting Muslims.  Cuba has very few Muslims, I believe, and they
have never been a factor in opposition to the regime.

But it is probably more likely that "Cuba" was inserted into the
quotation by his Afghan captors or their American editors and bosses.
Fred Feldman


Pakistan Allows Taliban to Train, a Detained Fighter Says
By CARLOTTA GALL

Published: August 4, 2004 NYTimes.com



KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 3 - For months Afghan and American officials
have complained that even while Pakistan cooperates in the fight against
Al Qaeda, militant Islamic groups there are training fighters and
sending them into Afghanistan to attack American and Afghan forces.

Pakistani officials have rejected the allegations, saying they are
unaware of any such training camps. Now the Afghan government has
produced a young Pakistani, captured fighting with the Taliban in
southern Afghanistan three months ago, whose story would seem to back
its complaints about Pakistan.

The prisoner, who gave his name as Muhammad Sohail, is a 17-year-old
from the Pakistani port city of Karachi, held by the Afghan authorities
in Kabul. In an interview in late July, in front of several prison
guards, he said Pakistan was allowing militant groups to train and
organize insurgents to fight in Afghanistan. Mr. Sohail said he hoped
that granting the interview would increase his chances of being freed.
Mr. Sohail described his recruitment through his local mosque by a group
listed by the United States as having terrorist links, his military
training in a camp not far from the capital, Islamabad, and his dispatch
with several other Pakistanis to Afghanistan.

He did not give all the details that intelligence officials said they
gleaned from him in interrogations, but he talked easily about his party
and its leaders, and said they had high-level support from within the
establishment. He said he was recruited and trained within the past
eight months by Jamiat-ul-Ansar, the new name for the
Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen party, which was designated a terrorist group by
the State Department and banned by President Pervez Musharraf of
Pakistan in January 2002. Under its new name it is functioning, if more
discreetly, and its leader, Fazlur Rehman Khalil, moves around freely.

Mr. Khalil has been involved in recruiting and training militants since
the 1980's. In 1998, American planes bombed his training camp in
Afghanistan when they were targeting Osama bin Laden after the bombings
of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The bombing killed a
number of Pakistanis, and Mr. Khalil at the time vowed to take revenge
against America for the attack.

It is an open secret in Pakistan that groups supporting separatism in
Kashmir have not stopped their activities, despite official
declarations, and have continued to train men and infiltrate them into
Indian Kashmir. Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said
during a visit to the region last month that Pakistan had not dismantled
all the camps used to train militants for Kashmir. And while he praised
Pakistan for its efforts against Al Qaeda, he urged the country to do
more to stop Taliban militants carrying out attacks from Pakistan.

Mr. Sohail is not the first Pakistani to be captured fighting alongside
the Taliban and other militants in Afghanistan over the past two years.
On at least one occasion, Pakistanis who were captured in a joint
American-Afghan military operation last year were handed back to
Pakistan. But he is the first made available for an interview by the
Afghan government. Intelligence officials said they found on him a
Jamiat-ul-Ansar membership card and a list of phone numbers of
high-level party officials.

A Pakistani official interviewed recently described Mr. Sohail as a
"one-off case," and denied that Pakistani militants were showing up in
Afghanistan.

The Pakistani ambassador to Afghanistan, Rustam Shah Mohmand, said he
thought Jamiat-ul-Ansar and its network had been dismantled. "There is
no ambiguity in our policy," he said. "The government does not sponsor,
nor create, nor is aware of training camps. If they were aware of any,
they would go and dismantle them."

Zalmay M. Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, has stated
publicly that Pakistan has not done nearly enough to stop the Taliban
and other militants from using Pakistan's border areas as operational
and recruiting bases.

In a speech in Washington in April, he warned that if Pakistan did not
do the job on its side of the border, American forces would have to do
the job themselves.

A Western diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity in an interview
last month in Kabul said: "When you talk about Taliban, it's like fish
in a barrel in Pakistan. They train, they rest there. They get support."

Western diplomats in Kabul and Pakistani political analysts have said
that Pakistan has continued to allow the Taliban to operate to retain
influence in Afghanistan. Pakistan supported the Taliban in the 1990's
as a way to create an area where Pakistani forces could retreat to the
west if war erupted with its the country's longtime rival and neighbor
to the east, India. Pakistan has also long tried to maintain influence
over Afghanistan's largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns, because of its
wariness of its own Pashtun minority in the border areas.

General Musharraf may also fear that a crackdown on the Taliban will
provoke protests from an alliance of hard-line Islamist political
parties that are now the third largest block in Parliament, the Western
diplomat in Kabul said. And Pakistani officials may fear that the United
States will abandon the region if Mr. bin Laden is captured.

In interviews along the border over the past two years, Pakistani
government officials have made statements that they do not see the
Taliban as a threat to Pakistan. They have also, at times, said the
Taliban have a legitimate political grievance in Afghanistan.

Mr. Sohail was probably chosen to fight in Afghanistan because he is a
Pashtun, the dominant group in the Taliban. Born in Swat, near the
Afghan border, he grew up in Karachi, left school at 15 and went to work
in a confectionary shop.

"I was going to the mosque every Thursday, and they were saying you
should go and do jihad," he said. "In Palestine, Chechnya, Cuba, France
and a lot of places all over the world, they are mistreating Muslims. So
I decided to do it and got training for one month."
Full article:http:
//www.nytimes.com/2004/08/04/international/asia/04afgh.html



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