Mullah Omar in South Afghanistan: Pakistan

[EagleEyes]

Pakistan Says Taliban Chief Is in South Afghanistan

Pakistan said on Jan. 22 it was likely that the Taliban’s fugitive chief, Mullah Mohammad Omar, was in southern Afghanistan and leading the insurgency against Afghan, U.S. and NATO-led forces from there.

A Taliban spokesman captured in Afghanistan last week claimed that Omar was living in Pakistan under the protection of its main spy agency.

Tasnim Aslam, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, rejected the claim and said Omar was most probably in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar.

"We have very regular meetings, intelligence sharing with the U.S., to some extent with Afghans. Nobody has any information about the whereabouts of Mullah Omar," she told a weekly news conference in Islamabad.
"But, generally, the likely scenario is that he is in Kandahar where he’s marshalling his fighters."

Pakistan was the Taliban’s main backer until the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, whereupon it joined the American-led war on terrorism.
But Afghan anger at Taliban infiltration from Pakistan has seriously strained ties between the two U.S. allies.

The American military has reported a sharp increase in the number of Taliban attacks from Pakistan, where they say the Taliban’s command and control is based in lawless tribal areas.

Pakistan, battling militants in its tribal lands along the border, acknowledges that some are slipping into Afghanistan, but says the Taliban are an Afghan problem, feeding on poverty and anger with the government over corruption.
Last year, Afghanistan saw the bloodiest period of insurgency since the U.S.-led forces ousted the Taliban. More than 4,000 people were killed.

Pakistan has been under constant pressure from the United States and other Western countries to do more to stem militants crossing over into Afghanistan.

Aslam said terrorist activities were being originated in Afghan refugee camps near the border and asked the international community to help relocate them inside Afghanistan.

"We have 3 million Afghan refugees and we also suspect that the refugees camps which are close to the border, three or four, are the hub of these activities, undesirable activities," she said.

 

[Janbaz]

Definitely, he has to be in the heartland where his movement originated, the Panjwai district. So, use common sense dummies, who think he is in Pakistan. He is not a citizen here.

 

[blain2]

This is what needs to happen....not the crappy "beat the Talib/Pashtun into submission" tactics which are bound to fail. It would do the Idiots in NATO/ISAF/US good to read this article over and over.

Winning the peace in Afghanistan



With the war with the Taliban bogging down, Pakistan appears receptive to new ideas
January 26, 2007
Jonathan Power
ISLAMABAD–Pervez Musharraf, president and military strongman of Pakistan, opened his eyes wide, sat bolt upright on his sofa, and said, "I never thought of that." He repeated the phrase and looked, I dare to suggest, a little bewildered. In many years of interviewing top leaders I have never before felt the sensation of catching someone totally off balance. Yet all I had asked was:
"Why don't you talk to your enemies, the Taliban and Al Qaeda?"
In two hours of conversation there was no effort, as is usual with senior Pakistani officials, to persuade me that the Taliban and Al Qaeda were being defeated or that the war in Afghanistan was going well. Indeed, there was an absence of bravado and a receptivity to new, unconsidered, ideas.
Pakistan is the hub of the Anglo-American/NATO war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The British have here their largest embassy in the world. The city is full to the brim with American secret agents and senior military people.
But the truth is the war in Afghanistan is going badly. The Taliban is gaining the upper hand, financially fuelled by proceeds from poppy growing, which they now encourage in a reverse of policy when they were in power, when they ruled that it was unIslamic. Al Qaeda, too, high up in the mountains of Pakistan, is rebuilding its strength.
In different ways both the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan are besieged.
President Hamid Karzai appears to realize that the Western forces are losing ground to the Taliban and that he is unable to do much about the infiltration of fresh warriors from Pakistan.
Musharraf, for his part, is throwing some 80,000 troops into the frontier areas.
But with the militants finding it all too easy to hide in the refugee camps on Pakistani soil, where 2.5 million mainly Pashtun Afghan refugees live, and with both Afghanistan and the West pouring scorn on his suggestion that he mine and fence the border, the battle is uphill with heavy losses on the Pakistani side.
Meanwhile, support grows in Pakistan for the militants. As a former Pakistani ambassador, Tariq Fatemi, wrote recently in the Karachi newspaper Dawn, brute force tactics that have often killed women and children and destroyed homes and crops have been counterproductive. "The impression has gained ground among the tribes that we are oblivious to their lives and interests."
On both sides of the border are the Pashtuns, arguably the world's most adept fighting people. They call the shots.
The Pashtuns have been the standard-bearers of Afghan nationalism ever since the state came into being 250 years ago. One invasion, British or Soviet or American, is just like another.
It is mandatory in the Pashtun code of honour for an insult to be avenged. As the saying goes, "A Pashtun waited 100 years and then took his revenge – it was quick work."
Only by entering into negotiations to compensate for lives and dishonour done to the deceased, the maimed and insulted can the mutual reinforcing cycle of violence be curtailed.
A jirga (tribal council), which brings together the Taliban, Kabul, Islamabad and Pakistani's northern tribes, each with equal representation, must begin a dialogue toward a ceasefire. The Taliban will insist on a timetable for withdrawal of U.S./NATO troops.
We should not fear the Afghan Taliban. Mullah Omar's interview in January suggests he is distancing himself from Osama bin Laden.
Not one Afghan has been associated with any terror attacks on the West. Bin Laden, assuming he and his men are in Pakistan, can no longer easily finance or mastermind terrorism from a remote cave. He should be finished off by careful police work. Al Qaeda operatives are paying locals in dollars for protection, Musharraf told me. That should leave a kind of paper trail.
As for the harsher side of would-be Taliban rule: Let Pashtun culture work on that over time. The Pashtun zeitgeist, as another Dawn writer, M.P. Bhandara, suggests, "does not offer democracy but it does stress personal autonomy and equality."
This is why I proposed to Musharraf that he talk to the Taliban, even to Al Qaeda. "No one has ever suggested that," he added. "You have a point. I must think about it." I also suggested he engage in less "bang-bang" and more economic and social development in the alienated border villages. He did not demur.
Finally, I said, quoting a column by Maia Szalavitz in the International Herald Tribune from January last year, why not persuade the international community to buy up the poppy crop direct from the peasants and use it for badly needed medicinal purposes, undercutting both the mafia and the Taliban's source of funds?
"I have never thought of that either," he said. "Yes, perhaps we could. Let's cost it and see if it is practical."
Thinking the unthinkable would be a useful start.

Jonathan Power is an international affairs writer based in Britain. He is the author of Vision Of Hope, a history of the United Nations.

http://www.thestar.com/article/175027

 

[SMC]

The afghan government a.k.a city government of Kabul should know that he's in Afghanistan, but since they only have control of Kabul, they can't capture him and convenientally blame Pakistan for their problems. Basically making Pakistan a scapegoat.

In other words, following India's example!

 

[MastanKhan]

Hi,

Reportedly it is stated that afghanistan/Karzai has rejected the idea of selling opium to the uk drug industry to produce morphine.

 

[extinct]

There goes the sole source of revenue...

 

[pilot_dude]

If Mulla omar was in Pakistani territory he would have been caught/killed a long time ago. He has to be hiding in middle of no where in afghanistan in a cave.