Pakistan bids to avert US-Taliban showdown
( 2001-09-28 11:02 ) (7 )

Pakistan was poised to make a last-ditch bid on Friday to persuade the Taliban regime to hand over the world's most wanted man, as Washington sought UN backing in padlocking the war chests of global terrorism.

Islamabad was on Friday to send an official delegation to Afghanistan for talks with ruling the Taliban on defusing their stand-off with the United States, sparked by Kabul's refusal to surrender Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the September 11 terror attacks on New York and Washington, Pakistani and Taliban officials said.

"This is a last-ditch effort to try and find some mutually acceptable solution to the current crisis," one source said, declining to give details of the proposals the team would carry with them to the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.

But pro-Taliban leaders in Pakistan boycotted the mission because they were unwilling to carry a demand by Islamabad that the hard-line Islamists hand over Saudi-born bin Laden or face possible US military strikes.

An attempt by Pakistan 10 days ago to secure the surrender of bin Laden, whom the Taliban are thought to be sheltering, failed to yield results. Washington has threatened to destroy the Taliban regime if it refuses to cooperate.

A Taliban envoy conceded on British television that the fundamentalists had not lost track of bin Laden, saying he had probably received a message from Afghanistan's religious leaders asking him to leave the country voluntarily.

"We don't say that we have lost him, but he is out of sight. He is living in an unknown hideout," Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban's Pakistan envoy, told London's Channel 4 on Wednesday.

"I think he might have received the message of the Ulema council requesting him to leave Afghanistan voluntarily but what happens now we will have to see," he said, adding that the Taliban would not compromise on giving up bin Laden.

A council of Afghan clerics voted last week to ask the fugitive to leave Afghanistan, but the Taliban insisted that they could not find bin Laden to deliver the message, a claim Washington scoffed at.

In a sign of Islamabad's growing frustration with the Taliban's intransigence, Pakistan on Thursday urged "flexibility" and said the Islamic militia needed to listen to the advice of its "friends."

But Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar remained defiant, warning that if Washington attacked the Taliban, its forces and their Afghan allies would be face the same fate the Soviets and their local supporters did during their occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980's.

Even as a huge US war machine massed around Afghanistan ahead of possible retaliation for the terror attacks that left more than 6,000 people dead or missing, Washington played down the prospect of imminent war.

"We're not leaping into this. We're moving into it in a measured way," said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as Pentagon officials stressed that the focus was now on intelligence gathering, diplomacy and financial measures as its main weapons in its global campaign against terror.

Washington on Thursday took its fight to put a choke hold on terrorists' sources of funding to the United Nations, in an apparent bid to ensure world backing for President George W Bush's long war against terror.

It asked the Security Council to adopt a resolution forcing UN member states to cut off financial and logistic support to terrorist groups.

If adopted, the resolution -- which officials hope will be approved by the end of the month -- would give the council authority to impose sanctions or use force against countries which failed to cooperate.

Bush this week announced the freezing of the US assets of suspected terrorists -- including bin Laden's al-Qaeda network -- and warned foreign banks to follow suit or face a similar fate in the United States.

The president is stitching together an international coalition against terror and is anxious to maintain unity in the world community amid fears that the campaign could be perceived as a battle against Islam.

But Washington on Thursday won qualified support for the global anti-terror drive from two key Arab countries, Jordan and Syria.

Jordan's King Abdullah II told US Secretary of State Colin Powell here that Amman and other Arab nations were "committed" to "a serious fight against terrorism," the state department said.

But he warned that eradicating the roots of terror must be linked to greater US-led efforts to resolve the festering Arab-Israeli conflict.

And Syrian Foreign Minister Faruq Shara said Thursday that Damascus backed the anti-terror drive, but stressed the battle must be waged within the framework of the United Nations.

Bush meanwhile vowed that Washington would not be distracted by any international jitters over the campaign.

"Others will tire and weary. I understand that, but not our nation. Others will second guess, but not our nation. Others will become impatient, but not this great nation," he told a cheering crowd at Chicago's O'Hare airport.

State Department officials meanwhile scuppered a suggestion -- reportedly by the Taliban -- that US civil rights leader Jesse Jackson could act as a mediator between Washington and Kabul.

Washington rejects the idea of negotiating, demanding simply that the Taliban hand over bin Laden and his lieutenants. "We have nothing to negotiate, they know what our position is," Colin Powell said.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan meanwhile made an appeal for US$584 million to fend off the growing humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan.

Almost half the money, US$273 million, is to allow the UN agencies cope with around 1.5 million people expected to flee into Pakistan and other neighbouring countries amid fears of war.

President Bush meanwhile urged Americans to take to the skies again on the nation's airlines, which are buckling under the burden of boosted security costs and plummeting passenger numbers following the terror attacks.

Speaking in Chicago, Bush also unveiled new measures aimed at averting any repeat of the hijacking drama in which terrorists turned for passenger jets into missiles, slamming them into New York's World Trade Center, the Pentagon and into a field in Pennsylvania.

The Pentagon simultaneously confirmed that mid-level air force generals had been authorized to order airliners threatening US cities shot down, but assured the public it has nothing to fear from fighter pilots with loose trigger fingers.

In New York, Mayor Rudy Giuliani said on Thursday the number of people registered as missing in the ruins of the World Trade Center had fallen to 5,960 and was likely to fall further. The current total of dead and missing in all the US attacks now stands at 6,498.