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Taliban said to suffer major setback
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Also by Sayed Salahuddin and Anton Ferreira:
- Taliban said to suffer major setback (November 11, 2001)
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by Sayed Salahuddin and Anton Ferreira
Sunday, November 11, 2001
KABUL/WASHINGTON (REUTERS) — The war against Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network appeared to have swung sharply in favor of the U.S.-led coalition Sunday after Afghan rebels claimed to have captured a vast region of territory and to have crippled the ruling Taliban’s fighting force.
The opposition Northern Alliance said the cream of the Taliban army had been wiped out in a string of surprise defeats, and it refused to rule out an advance on Kabul, injecting new urgency into the search for a post-Taliban government.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the Northern Alliance had “effective control” of the key crossroads city of Mazar-i-Sharif, but was still meeting pockets of resistance, while British officials confirmed British troops were in Afghanistan assisting the alliance’s advances.
In Mazar-i-Sharif Sunday, Afghans lined up at barber shops Sunday to shave their once-mandatory beards; forbidden music blared from shops, and some women threw off the head-to-toe burqa veil as the city emerged from the draconian lifestyle under the Taliban, the Afghan Islamic Press said.
Heading the offensive in Mazar-i-Sharif was Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek, whose forces have a reputation for heavy-handed treatment of civilians. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Sunday that Dostum had been told in advance “their practices have to change this time around.”
The opposition previously said an offensive would stop outside Kabul, where it is hated for its power struggles in the 1990s that subjected the city to almost daily rocket attacks and killed 50,000 residents.
Pakistan has warned of a repeat of violence in Kabul if the Northern Alliance takes the city. Other countries have also said it could complicate a post-Taliban political settlement.
Northern Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah said he had been surprised by the speed of the gains made by his forces in the past 48 hours that had secured them half of the country, compared to less than 10 percent just three days ago.
“The importance of this big defeat for the Taliban, dramatic defeat for the Taliban, is not only that they have lost large areas, but they have lost their main fighting force,” said the minister, who would not rule out an advance by alliance fighters on Kabul.
Key American officials dismissed claims by bin Laden in a weekend interview with a Pakistani newspaper that he had nuclear and chemical weapons that he would use as a deterrent to any U.S. attacks using such materials.
“I think it’s unlikely he has a nuclear weapon,” Rumsfeld said. “It is certainly reasonable to assume he might very well have chemical or biological and possibly even radiation weapons.”
Rumsfeld said the United States was trying to pinpoint the whereabouts of bin Laden and other al Qaeda or Taliban leaders so they could be killed.
“Certainly if we had coordinates, precise targeting information … that we would do something about it,” he said. “And we have been trying, energetically. But we have not been able to thus far stop them. That is to say, kill them.”
In the interview with the Pakistani newspaper, bin Laden scoffed at the idea that he was behind the dissemination of anthrax through the U.S. mail, an act that has killed four people and made 13 others ill.
The cases of anthrax in the United States have pushed Americans to change their habits, with more than a third tossing away junk mail and nearly as many washing their hands after touching mail, a Time magazine/CNN poll found.
The poll also showed 92 percent of Americans believed agents of bin Laden were currently in the United States.
As concern grew about nuclear weapons, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf dismissed fears his own nuclear arms could be at risk or that he might find it hard to stay in power because of opposition to the campaign in Afghanistan.
The Washington Post reported that Musharraf ordered an emergency redeployment of the country’s nuclear arsenal to secret new locations and reorganized military oversight of the arsenal to protect the weapons from theft or attack.
