M A I N   N E W S

Afghanistan new target of Pak’s proxy war
Rajeev Sharma
Tribune News Service

New Delhi, August 24
It is not just India which finds itself at the receiving end of Pakistan’s proxy war but Islamabad’s new strategy puts its another neighbour — Afghanistan — on the hit list of the Pakistani Mullah-Military Alliance (MMA).

The deadly cocktail of the ISI and the fundamentalist clergy have a new target in Afghanistan as the USA finds itself preoccupied with Iraq and the “classical guerrilla warfare” the US forces are facing in that occupied nation.

Sources said here today that on August 17 some 400 heavily-armed militants of Pakistan intruded in the Paktika province of Afghanistan and killed 25 Afghanistanis.

The Pakistan-Afghanistan relation in the post-Taliban scenario have hit an all-time low as Pakistan continues to provide shelter and logistic support to rebel forces in its side of the border to launch strikes against targets in Afghanistan.

The militants who participated in the August 17 strike were trained at Madarsa Zubair in NWFP, Pakistan.

The decision to launch the attack against Afghan forces was taken at a closed-door meeting at Darul Aman Binori Madarsa in Karachi on July 19, 2003. The sources said the meeting was held under the chairmanship of Maulana Masood Azhar, founder of Jaish-e-Mohammed. The meeting was attended by several Taliban leaders.

At the meeting, Maulana Masood Azhar informed the Taliban leaders that the USA’s FBI had stopped raiding madarsas and as such with a tacit approval of the ISI, young Taliban were getting militant training at a number of madarsas, including one near Quetta which is training around 100 fighters belonging to the unit of Taliban commander Ghulam Habi.

The others are madarsa Khortka Rehmatullah-Alai-Khe, madarsa Farooqia near Peshawar, and madarsa Asaniya in Rakhatabad, also near Peshawar.

In addition, some 3000 students are on the rolls of Darul Aman Benori madarsa in Karachi and 80 per cent of them are capable of being used for terrorist activities in Afghanistan.

Over 100 persons have died in these acts of violence perpetrated by the Taliban on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Most of the deaths have taken place in Afghanistan’s provinces of Helmand, Kandahar, Zabul, Paktika, Khost and Gunar.

The Afghanistan government has confirmed that several members of the group that attacked at several places in Paktika on August 17 spoke Urdu and Arabic, indicating the presence of Pakistanis and Arabs among them.