Taliban wants to establish Islamic State in Afghanistan:report

New York, Nov 3 (PTI) Refusing any peace talk with America, a top-ranking Taliban commander has said that his group has waged war against the U.S.-led forces to create an Islamic State in Afghanistan and to bring Sharia law back to the country, a media report said Monday.

"There is nothing to talk about. This is not a
political campaign for policy change or power sharing or
cabinet ministries. We are waging jihad to bring Islamic law
back to Afghanistan," Mullah Sabir told Newsweek.

The news magazine said it conducted interview at
textile shop on Afghanistan-Pakistan border and identified
Sabir as one of the highest ranking commanders but said that
he did not want his full name to be used.

The refusal to negotiate comes straight from the
Taliban's supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, Sabir was
quoted as saying. "The tone of his rejection has been so
strong from the first that no one would dare to raise the
subject with him."

But Newsweek says Sabir hasn't seen Mullah Omar in
years, and he doesn't know of anyone who has. Internet posts
released in Mullah Omar's name on Muslim holy days are the
only hint that the one-eyed leader is still alive. All the
same, Sabir says he and thousands of other Taliban won't stop
fighting until they're back in power.

Distrust is spreading in the ranks, Newsweek says,
adding that off the battlefield, Taliban fighters wonder aloud
what has become of Mullah Omar. Some think he may have been
put under house arrest—or worse—by his second in command and
brother-in-law Mullah Baradar.

"He may have removed himself, or someone may have
removed him," says a former Mullah Omar aide. "For the past
two years, no one that I know has any hard evidence of where
he is or what he's doing."

What would Mullah Omar say about mowing down civilians
and beheading captives in the name of jihad? the aide asks,
describing his former boss as a simple, decent village mullah
who was always upset to hear of his men doing bad things.

Everyone seems eager to talk peace in Afghanistan
except the only people who can turn the wish into a fact, the
magazine comments, pointing out that Taliban's "brutal
insurgent ally" Gulbuddin Hekmatyar has endorsed the idea of
negotiations; so has the U.S. defence secretary Robert Gates.

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah personally hosted an
exploratory discussion in Holy city Mecca between Afghan and
Pakistani officials and former Taliban members during Ramadan,
and last week Afghan and Pakistani tribal elders and
politicians held a two-day meeting in Islamabad.

But Mullah Omar's fighters, the magazine says, aren't
about to quit while they're on a roll. The number of coalition
deaths in Afghanistan since May has exceeded U.S. deaths in
Iraq for the first time since the invasion of Iraq. The Afghan
insurgency, which seemed as good as dead in 2004, has come
back strong.

The Americans, it says, aren't racing to the peace
table either, despite Gates' in-principle support for talks.

Big moves are likely to wait until the next U.S.
president takes office, and the consensus in any case is that
the situation on the ground isn't right yet.

"If you go into these talks when you appear to be
militarily weak, you're negotiating a partial surrender,"
warns Robert Neumann, who was U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan
from 2005 to 2007. The hope is that Gen David Petraeus, the
architect of the surge strategy in Iraq, will find a way to
fix that problem in his new role as CINCCENT—commander in
chief, U.S. Central Command.

Iraq's turnaround, Newsweek recalled, came when tribal
leaders in Anbar province, fed up with the brutality of Al
Qaeda in Iraq, banded together against the insurgency.

But the Taliban are running their own war, not taking
orders from psychopathic foreigners. Taliban commanders say
Osama bin Laden's global jihadists are not a significant force
in Afghanistan anymore.

"If they want to hide and fight here with us, we won't
stop them," says Mullah Sabir. "But they have no bases here,
and we will not let them use our territory as they did before
their strikes on the United States."

The 9/11 attacks and the resulting US invasion are a
source of deep resentment among the Taliban, Newsweek says.
"Today we are fighting because of Al Qaeda," Sabir complains.
"We lost our Islamic state. Al Qaeda lost nothing." Still,
talks with any segment of the Taliban will have to be
predicated on a complete break with Al Qaeda.

If that condition can be met, there are fissures that
Petraeus might find ways to exploit, the report says.

"Based on what we heard while we were there, a lot of
these guys are involved in the insurgency for economic reasons
first and ideological reasons second," Nathaniel Fick, who
served as a Marine officer in Afghanistan during the first
year of the war and returned this summer to do research for
the Center for a New American Security, told he magazine.

"Eighty percent of the fighters are part-timers. We
know that from data the military has collected. Most of those
part-timers, one would think, are 'reconcilable' "—that is,
they could be persuaded to leave the insurgency. Even some
high-ranking members are showing interest in the Saudi
meeting.

"Now the Taliban know there's another way besides the
military option," Zabibullah, a senior Taliban political
operative in Pakistan, is quoted as saying. "Talks may be
something to consider." PTI D.S.
RKM