Ex-Taliban Official Says No Chance of Encore

Sept. 11, 2002
By Saeed Ali Achakzai

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - A former deputy minister of Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime said on Wednesday the movement had lost popular support and there was no chance of it ever making a comeback.

"The Taliban were narrow-minded, that was a major reason why the people were not happy with us," Mullah Abdul Samad Khaksar, who served as the Taliban's deputy foreign minister, told Reuters in the group's former bastion of Kandahar.

Khaksar said the one-eyed Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, and Osama bin Laden, the man blamed by the United States for the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington, never consulted the cabinet on national issues.

"Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden used to take decisions on their own and the cabinet was nothing more than a rubber stamp," he said.

"That is one reason why they were so cut off from the people and stand no chance of ever staging a come back."

Khaksar, a known moderate among the Taliban's leaders who stayed behind when the rest fled Kabul last November, said the group's narrow interpretation of Islam was not liked by the people but they had no option but to accept it.

Mullah Omar, who harnessed support from majority ethnic Pashtuns, imposed on Afghanistan a strict interpretation of Islam that banned women from education or showing their faces in public.

All forms of entertainment, including music and television, were prohibited and men forced to wear beards.

Khaksar said he had suggested to Mullah Omar to form a national government with representation from ethnic minorities which would establish links with the outside world and end Afghanistan's international isolation, but he did not listen.

The whereabouts of both bin Laden and Mullah Omar are not known, but Khaksar said he believed the latter was alive and living in eastern Afghanistan.

Khaksar, who now supports the U.N.-backed government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai -- who was the target of an assassination attempt in Kandahar last week -- blamed the Taliban for the presence of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan.

"It is because of their wrong policies that they had to intervene," he said.

Khaksar said September 11 had shown that terrorism was the biggest threat to the world peace.

"The assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai was also a terrorist attack," he said. "The entire world should unite to fight terrorism."

Khaksar said a new era of development had begun in Afghanistan and called upon the international community to come forward to help Afghans rebuild a country battered by 23 years of war and internal conflicts.

Thousands of the U.S. soldiers are based in Afghanistan, searching for remnants of the Taliban and al Qaeda, many of whom are thought to have fled to Pakistan and other neighboring countries.

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=574&ncid=721&e=1&u=
/nm/20020911/wl_nm/attack_afghan_taliban_dc