September 26, 2001
Saudi Arabia Cuts Ties With Taliban
By JOHN F. BURNS with CHRISTOPHER S. WREN
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sept. 25 — Saudi Arabia announced today that it had broken relations with Afghanistan because of the ruling Taliban's insistence on supporting "criminals and terrorists."
An official statement issued through the Saudi Press Agency said the kingdom of Saudi Arabia was severing diplomatic ties because "the Taliban have ignored all of the contacts and the attempts by the kingdom to persuade them to stop harboring criminals and terrorists and training them and inciting them and making its land a refuge and haven for them."
The Afghan people's fight for independence — an allusion to their violent resistance to Soviet occupation — had earned their country "a special status" in the hearts of those who championed the right of nations to be free and independent, the Saudi announcement said.
It charged that "the Taliban have used that special status for Afghanistan not for building the ties of brotherhood and for building and development and enforcing the lofty aims which Islam represents, but have made its land a center for attracting, training and recruiting a number of gullible men from different lands, especially citizens of the kingdom, in order to carry out criminal acts that violate all faiths and creeds."
The Taliban, it added, was "continuing to reject handing over those criminals to justice." Such behavior by the Taliban, it said, was "defaming Islam and defaming Muslims' reputation in the world."
The statement did not specifically mention Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born terrorist leader wanted in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Mr. bin Laden has lived in Afghanistan since 1996 under the protection of the Taliban, which refused to hand him over and now claims not to know where he is.
"In spite of what happened and what is happening," the Saudi statement said, "the Taliban government is still continuing to use its land to harbor, arm and encourage those criminals in carrying out terrorist attacks that horrify those who live in peace and the innocent and spread terror and destruction in the world." An English translation of the announcement was carried by the Associated Press.
Saudi Arabia's decision to break relations has potentially far reaching consequences, not least because the Saudis are the guardians of Islam's holiest sites in Mecca and Medina. Saudi Arabia recognized the Taliban as Afghanistan's government in 1997, only to freeze relations a year later over Mr. bin Laden's presence in Afghanistan as the "guest" of the Taliban. Mr. bin Laden was stripped of his Saudi citizenship in 1994.
The Saudi government's break in relations leaves Pakistan as the only nation that still recognizes the Taliban. The United Arab Emirates cut its ties with the Taliban government over the weekend.
But Pakistan signaled that it, too, had all but abandoned the Taliban when it announced that it had withdrawn all its remaining diplomats over the weekend from missions in Kabul and Kandahar, as well as Herat and Jalalabad.
Sounding a note of finality, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Monday that Pakistan had done all it could. "We sent a delegation," he said. "We did so because we care about the Afghan government and Afghan people" he said.
Military officers from the United States and Pakistan, planning for probable American strikes into Afghanistan, have been meeting behind a wall of secrecy here to work out ways of using Pakistan's air bases, ports and other sites in the war President Bush has promised against international terrorism.
Pakistan's Foreign Ministry said a three-man American military team had begun working out details of Pakistan's role, but its presence here was so sensitive, in a volatile nation of 140 million Muslims that has already been swept by protests, that the American Embassy would not go beyond acknowledging that the Pentagon team had arrived.
"I can confirm their presence, but I won't go into any details," Mark Wentworth, an embassy spokesman, said Monday.
Although the Pentagon has given no indication of when or how the first strikes might come, a senior Pakistani military officer said before the meetings began that Pakistan's frontier forces facing Afghanistan had not been raised to their highest state of alert or given any hint of what the American war plans might be.
His conclusion, the officer said, was that the first American strikes would probably involve air attacks from bases elsewhere, including ships in the Arabian Sea, and air bases in the Persian Gulf, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Pakistan, he said, seems likely to be involved only at a later stage, when ground operations inside Afghanistan were ordered. That, he said, appeared to be "weeks away" at the earliest.
As planning proceeded, the chances of avoiding conflict appeared to diminish as belligerent statements were issued on Monday in the name of two men certain to be at the top of American priorities: Mr. bin Laden, and Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Muslim cleric who heads the Taliban government in Afghanistan.
The signed statement attributed to Mr. bin Laden referred to a "new Jewish-Christian crusader campaign that is led by the chief crusader Bush under the banner of the cross." It said, "We ask God to make us defeat the infidels and oppressors and to crush the new Jewish-Christian crusader campaign on the land of Pakistan and Afghanistan."
The message made no mention of the attacks in the United States, opening instead with an expression of "great sorrow" for three protesters shot dead by policemen confronting Islamic militants in Karachi, Pakistan's most populous city, on Saturday.
It warned of the bloodshed awaiting American troops, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which has pledged "full support" for any American military operation aimed at uprooting Mr. bin Laden's terrorist network, Al Qaeda, and punishing the Taliban for giving him sanctuary.
The statement purported to be Mr. bin Laden's was faxed to Al Jazeera television network in Qatar, which has often been chosen by Mr. bin Laden as the outlet for statements and videotapes propagating his "holy war" against the United States. Al Jazeera said it believed that the statement, which it translated from Arabic, was authentic, with a signature that appeared identical to Mr. bin Laden's earlier messages, but gave no details of where the message had originated.
The authenticity of Mullah Omar's message was not challenged, since it was delivered by telephone to Reuters here by Abdul Hai Mutmaen, the Taliban's chief spokesman, from Kandahar.
"America should not mislead itself," the statement said. "It cannot emerge from this crisis by the murder of myself and Osama bin Laden." It demanded that the United States withdraw its forces from the Persian Gulf and "end its partisanship in Palestine," and concluded, "If America does not take the above-mentioned steps, it will be involved in a vain and bloody war."
Since the attacks in the United States, Mr. bin Laden has disappeared from view. Statements by Taliban officials Monday, in Islamabad and from their headquarters in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, stuck to the claims made repeatedly since Sept. 11 that the Taliban had no idea where he was.
"Of course he will be somewhere in Afghanistan, in some hidden place," Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, said at a news conference at the Afghan Embassy today. Asked about a welter of unattributed reports in Pakistan that Mr. bin Laden had been moving from hideout to hideout in Afghanistan, Mullah Zaeef offered one the Taliban's most ambiguous formulations.
"As I said, he is missing in Afghanistan, but it doesn't mean he is lost," he said. "He may be some place hiding."
Mullah Omar's whereabouts were also uncertain as pressures on the Taliban mounted with the increasing tempo of American military planning. On Sunday a spokesman for the Northern Alliance, the fractious opposition force in Afghanistan that Washington is looking to as a possible partner in operations against the Taliban, said the alliance had "sure" information that Mullah Omar was with Mr. bin Laden, probably in the mullah's mountainous home province of Oruzgan, north of Kandahar.
Mullah Zaeef, the ambassador in Islamabad, hedged on the issue, saying it was "an Afghan security issue." But reports in Pakistan, attributed to Taliban officials, have said the reclusive Taliban leader left his modest home near the old royal palace in the center of Kandahar after his meetings early last week with a Pakistan military delegation that carried an ultimatum from Mr. Bush for the handover of Mr. bin Laden.
The Taliban's embassy in Islamabad remains open, but even there, officials appeared at Monday's news conference to be increasingly nervous at what lies ahead. Mullah Zaeef, the ambassador, played down the growing refugee crisis in Afghanistan, where more than a million people are said to have fled the major cities, fearing American attacks.
He returned several times to pleas for the United States to turn away from war. Reading a statement from the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Kabul, he said Afghans remembered "sympathetically" the United States support in the fight against occupying Soviet forces in the 1980's.
"We want to say to the American people to urge their authorities to save the people of Afghanistan and America from the impacts and consequences and untoward problems of a war," it said.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
