AFGHANISTAN: Taliban Guerrillas Close to Seizing Kabul, U.N. Says

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UNITED NATIONS, Sep 25 1996 (IPS) - The Islamist Taliban guerrilla force is on the verge of entering Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, and potentially winning the long Afghan civil war, U.N. officials say.

U.N. Under-Secretary-General Marrack Goulding, who returned this week from a trip to Afghanistan, said Wednesday that “Taliban is at the gates of Kabul,” and that many soldiers defending Burhannudin Rabbani’s government are reportedly defecting.

U.N. sources here say the Pushtun-speaking rebels, who began a campaign in 1994 to oust Rabbani’s Tajik-speaking but also Islamist forces, are close to conquering Kabul. Taliban seized the key nearby city of Jalalabad two weeks ago, and has pounded Kabul for several days.

Under-Secretary-General Chinmaya Gharekhan confirmed that Taliban has seized the town of Saroubi, 70 kms east of the capital, and that government troops have retreated to the borders of Kabul itself. Taliban has also seized Kabul’s main power station, Gharekhan added.

Ravan Farhadi, Afghanistan’s U.N. ambassador, claimed that the Taliban troops have retreated Wednesday from the capital’s outskirts following heavy fighting. But Gharekhan could not confirm any such retreat, and said the situation remains confusing.

“Of a particularly great concern to the United Nations is the determination of the warring parties to resort to military means to resolve the problems of the country, rather than peaceful negotiations,” Norbert Hall, special U.N. envoy to Afghanistan, said from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, Wednesday.

Hall appealed to all sides — including factions led by a Rabbani-allied Islamist, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and by Uzbek leader Rashid Ali Doestum — to cease fighting and renew stalled peace talks.

“Spare the lives of the innocent civilians who have already suffered enough from years of useless bloodshed,” Holl said.

But Taliban, a group founded by religious students educated in the Pashtun-speaking northwest region of Pakistan, this week refused to negotiate with what it calls “corrupt and criminal elements” in Kabul, Goulding said.

Rabbani’s foreign minister, Najibullah Lafraie, responded by accusing Pakistan of supporting, and even directly fighting with, the Taliban rebels.

“Pakistan is being transformed into the major source of intervention and aggression against the territorial integrity and natural sovereignty of Afghanistan,” Lafraie wrote in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

He claimed that at least 1,800 Pakistani troops are fighting with Taliban in the southwestern city of Maidanshar and in the Kunar valley. At least two-thirds of Afghanistan has fallen to Taliban since its rise two years ago.

Lafraie requested Boutros-Ghali to “send a fact-finding mission to observe and witness the presence of Pakistani armed groups in those Afghan provinces.”

For their part, Taliban leaders asked Goulding to investigate what they claimed is Russian, Indian, and Iranian support for Rabbani’s side.

“Everybody accuses the other side of receiving foreign help,” Goulding noted. But he added that the United Nations lacks “hard, incontrovertible evidence” of any outside support.

In any case, the U.N. Security Council has steered clear of sending any mission to Afghanistan, which has been the site of constant warfare among Islamic ‘mujahedin’ fighters ever since the Soviet-backed Najibullah regime collapsed in 1992.

Although some U.N. agencies, including the U.N. Children’s Fund, has deplored Taliban’s hard-line interpretation of Muslim law, other officials here have muted their concerns about the prospects that the rebels may seize power.

“There has been progress made, slow progress,” in moderating Taliban’s views, Goulding said. “It’s not hopeless.”

Yet the U.N. under-secretary-general added, “Some of their ideas are monstrous.” Taliban, he noted, have banned all access to education for girls and women in areas under their control. Some rebel forces also ban all music, sports, and Western media.

But Goulding contended that, when some Taliban leaders were shown Arabic translations of the U.N. Charter, they were willing to agree to its terms — including those which forbid discrimination by race, gender or religion. “They didn’t know about the Charter,” Goulding said, but he claimed they seemed ready to learn.