Afghanistan's Taliban regime Tuesday made a last-ditch appeal for negotiations, as western powers issued final ultimatums to hand over terrorist suspect Osama bin Laden or face military retaliation.
"We are prepared for negotiations. We will not follow war instead of negotiations," Taliban ambassador to Pakistan Abdul Salam Zaeef told a press conference in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta.
At the same time, Zaeef said the Islamic militia could never give up bin Laden without concrete evidence of his alleged involvement in the September 11 terror strikes in the United States.
"We condemn terrorism and the terrorist authorities but we need evidence and we need proof, which is the good way to solve problems.
"We welcome all countries to open negotiations. We are part of this world, we are happy to help with any action which is for peace."
The ambassador's appeals appeared to be a last desperate attempt to stave off US-led military attacks against bin Laden and the Taliban which has protected him in Afghanistan since 1996.
Zaeef said the Taliban would never "surrender" to US pressure, but he hinted it might consider handing bin Laden over to a third country to face justice.
"This is the way that belongs with negotiations. Maybe some country ... at the moment I can't say," he said in halting English.
Zaeef also confirmed that bin Laden was hiding in Afghanistan but insisted he did not know his exact location.
US President George W. Bush earlier Tuesday stressed that the time for negotiation had passed and the United States would strike whenever it saw fit.
"There is no timetable for the Taliban, just like there are no negotiations," Bush told reporters in the White House Oval Office.
In a clear acknowledgement of the growing diplomatic as well as military threat to the Islamic militia's seven-year-rule, Zaeef strongly rejected moves to bring back former Afghan king Mohammad Zahir Shah as the figurehead in a post-Taliban transitional government.
"He cannot play any role in Afghanistan," Zaeef said, while also denying reports of growing internal disaffection with the Taliban's supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.
"There is no difference in the Taliban. All the Taliban obey and they comply to the orders of [Omar]," he said.
Earlier Tuesday, more than 10,000 protestors took to the streets of the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, the Taliban's spiritual heartland, denouncing Zahir Shah, burning effigies of President Bush and chanting "Death to America".
At a similar rally in the eastern province of Paktia, local elders and tribal chiefs handed Taliban number two, Mullah Mohammad Hassan, a list of 6,000 people ready to participate in jihad (holy war) should the United States attack.
But outside Afghanistan, the hints of imminent military action came thick and fast.
In Brussels, NATO chief George Robertson said the United States had provided proof of the involvement of bin Laden's network in the kamikaze plane attacks on New York and Washington.
"We know that the individuals who carried out these attacks were part of the worldwide terrorist network al-Qaeda, headed by Osama bin Laden and his key lieutenants and protected by the Taliban," Robertson said.
The evidence will allow NATO to activate, for the first time in its 52-year history, a clause in the founding charter -- Article Five -- which states that an attack from abroad on one member is considered an attack on all.
Even President Pervez Musharraf of neighboring Pakistan -- the only country left that officially recognizes the Taliban -- warned that the writing seemed to be on the wall for the Islamic militia.
"It appears that the United States will take action in Afghanistan, and we have conveyed this to the Taliban," Musharraf told the BBC on Monday. Asked if the Taliban's days were numbered, he said: "It appears so."
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, meanwhile, delivered the Taliban its bluntest warning yet.
"Surrender the terrorists or surrender power," was Blair's message as he told a Labour Party conference that the US-led alliance, with possible British support, would target Taliban troops, supplies and military hardware.
A fourth US aircraft carrier, USS Kitty Hawk, left Japan and was sailing to join three other carriers already in position off South Asia and the Middle East, along with destroyers, submarines, more than 300 warplanes and 30,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines.
With the war rhetoric warming up on all sides, desperately needed food aid was flooding into Afghanistan as humanitarian agencies raced against time to boost warehouse stocks before a breakout of hostilities and the onset of winter.
As convoys rolled into the country from Pakistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan with nearly 1,500 tons of wheat for an estimated eight million Afghans in need of emergency assistance, World Food Program spokesman Khaled Mansour said as many as 400,000 were facing imminent death from starvation -- QUETTA, Pakistan (AFP)
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
