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September 24,
2001
In Afghanistan:
The
Northern Alliance
By Patrick
Cockburn
The
Independent
Our aging Russian-built helicopter flew
into the Panjshir valley from the north, high over desolate,
brown hills. At Changaram, a narrow point in the valley where
lush, green fields and terraces cling to the sides of the mountains,
we landed.
All along the narrow dirt road
are signs of the fate of armies which have tried to fight their
way into the Panjshir over the past quarter century.
I stopped counting the carcasses
of burnt-out and long-abandoned Soviet tanks after a few miles.
In some places, old tank treads had been used to fill potholes
in the road. The top of another tank could be seen just below
the surface of the river.
The Panjshir valley--perhaps
the greatest natural fortress in the world--is one of the last
strongholds of the Afghan opposition. It points like a bright
green arrow at Kabul, which is controlled, like the other nine-tenths
of the country, by the Taliban militia.
Abdullah Abdullah, the foreign
minister of the Northern Alliance, the main opposition grouping,
was in a cheerful mood as he sat, surrounded by flowers, in the
garden of his headquarters at Jabal Saraj, a dusty town 20 miles
inside Afghanistan. For some reason, a small canary had been
placed near a bush beside him.
Dr Abdullah, a suave engaging
man, has for years tried, with limited success until two weeks
ago, to interest the rest of the world in his views. The Afghan
opposition felt itself to be alone, even abandoned. Suddenly
everything it has said about the Taliban is being repeated by
world leaders, from Washington to Tokyo.
The world may be waiting for
the war to start but here the war--in one form or another--has
been going on for 20 years. And that war, in anticipation of
the wider war, is already heating up.
Mr Abdullah's forces had launched
an offensive far to the west, he said. They were trying to recapture
Mazar-i-Sharif, a city held by the Taliban since they captured
it and conducted a particularly savage massacre against the Shia
Muslim minority in 1997.
I asked if he knew the whereabouts
of Osama bin Laden. "I wish I did," he said, adding
that he had information that Mr bin Laden "had gone into
hiding several days ago near Kandahar in the province from where
the family of Mullah Omar, [the one-eyed leader of the Taliban]
originally came from". Asked if he had informants among
those around Mr bin Laden, he said that he relied rather on radio
intercepts.
He has one serious worry, however.
It was extraordinary, he said, that the United States appeared
to be relying on Pakistan and above all on Pakistan's intelligence
service to go after the Taliban. This "is the same deadly
organisation which created the Taliban," Mr Abdullah said.
"It is now meant to be acting against them. But I assure
you that Pakistani intelligence has people in it who are as fanatical
as bin Laden or Mullah Omar". Among the Afghan opposition,
hatred of Pakistan for creating the Taliban is almost visceral.
Nevertheless Mr Abdullah is
probably right in thinking that the Taliban are doomed. The opposition,
mostly drawn from Afghanistan's minorities, are beginning to
emerge from their strongholds.
The first sign of this is the
attack over the last three days on Mazar-i-Sharif by the Uzbek
General, Abdul Rashid Dostam, from his base south of the city
in the mountain gorges that even the Soviet army was never able
to conquer.
Despite the might of the forces
now mustering against them, most of the Taliban's frontline fighters--even
local leaders--probably do not know exactly what is happening.
The Northern Alliance says Arabs and Pakistanis fighting in the
Taliban's ranks began to leave about a week ago.
None the less, Mr Abdullah
believes that about 60 per cent of the Taliban's 60,000-strong
army will not desert. "They believe that Mullah Omar has
direct contact with God," he says. "They will die for
him and they will kill for him." The three cities where
the Taliban are concentrating their forces are Kabul, Kandahar
and Jalalabad. They are also moving ammunition dumps, splitting
up units so they are less vulnerable from the air and fortifying
positions.
We took off early in the morning
from Khodjabahutdin, a village of mud-brick houses, in northern
Afghanistan close to Tajikstan where our helicopter had been
forced to put down overnight because of bad weather and fading
light. Officials examined our papers closely because it was here,
on 9 September, that two men carrying Belgian passports but believed
to be Arab, posed as television journalists to assassinate Ahmed
Shah Masood, the opposition military leader, in a suicide bomb
attack.
The death of Masood, so closely
followed by the devastating air attacks on the World Trade Centre
and the Pentagon, has suddenly focused intense international
attention on the endless war in northern Afghanistan. In the
Panjshir, a poster with Masood's picture and a red rose, from
which four drops of blood fall, is everywhere.
The Afghan opposition forces
in the north are not large. They have about 15,000 well-trained
men, many of them in the Panjshir, and another 40,000 militia,
but they are now--finally--likely to receive as much money and
as many arms as they want.
Not that there is much of a
shortage of weaponry in the Panjshir valley. A large number of
old Soviet tanks sit in jerry-built military compounds beside
the road. I saw a family being driven around in an old Soviet-like
tank from which the gun had been removed. Apparently it was being
used as a taxi.
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