Exclusive: Warlord splits with Taliban (Gulbuddin Hekmatyar)

[maddezmom]

KARACHI, Pakistan - Fugitive Afghan rebel leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar told The Associated Press that his forces have ended cooperation with the Taliban and suggested that he was open to talks with embattled President Hamid Karzai.

In a video response to questions submitted by AP, Hekmatyar said that his group contacted Taliban leaders in 2003 and agreed to wage a joint jihad, or holy war, against American troops.

"The jihad went into high gear but later it gradually went down as certain elements among the Taliban rejected the idea of a joint struggle against the aggressor," Hekmatyar said in the video, which was received Thursday. Hekmatyar wore glasses and a black turban as he spoke in front of a plain white wall at an undisclosed location.

He offered no details of the split or its timing, but said his forces were now mounting only restricted operations, partly because of a lack of resources.

"It was not a good move by the Taliban to disassociate themselves from the joint struggle," he said. "Presently we have no contact with the Taliban."

more:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070308/ap_on_re_as/pakistan_hekmatyar

A doubly informative op-ed
In today's New York Times, Flynt Leverett, a former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, and Hillary Mann, a former Foreign Service officer, write about how the Bush administration has been playing rhetorical chicken with Iran since the beginning of 2002. Glenn (who should be working on his book) discussed the administration's most recent and blatant provocations against Iran earlier today, but Leverett and Mann describe an administration which has been dragging us toward this point all along.


In December 2001, xxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx x Tehran to keep Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the brutal pro-Al Qaeda warlord, from returning to Afghanistan to lead jihadist resistance there. xxxxx xxxxxxx so long as the Bush administration did not criticize it for harboring terrorists. But, in his January 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush did just that in labeling Iran part of the “axis of evil.” Unsurprisingly, Mr. Hekmatyar managed to leave Iran in short order after the speech. xxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxx the Islamic Republic could not be seen to be harboring terrorists.


If you're curious about all those Xs, they represent the black bars covering portions of the op-ed redacted by the White House. According to Leverett, this op-ed is "based on (a) longer paper...just published with the Century Foundation--which was cleared by the CIA without modifying a single word of the draft." The White House, Leverett says, demanded that he and Mann redact several sections of the piece, including at least one whole paragraph, claiming that they deal with classified information.



(snip)
Since the information is already in the public domain, however, we get to see a bit more of how the increasingly creaky clockworks of this administration operate. The muckrakers at Josh Marshall's TPMmuckraker's site have been creating a list of information that this administration has "disappeared" since Bush took office. When you look at that list in light of today's piece, it becomes clear that this is part of and informational set piece, designed to keep Americans from understanding the full depths of either their ineptitude or their intent to begin yet another war in the Middle East. Bushies do not want Americans to connect these dots. They know the information exists in scattered bits--as thousands of points of light?--but clearly intended to prevent the synthesis of this information becoming part of the conversation about how the U.S. should deal with Iran.

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com /

Bush Admin: What You Don't Know Can't Hurt Us
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002175.php

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x252716

[Kagemusha]

1. That warlord saw his best days ages and ages ago

Hard for me to see what Karzai would want him back for to begin with or what Karzai could offer. Maybe the guy's freeing himself up for CIA support against Iran.

[bemildred]

3. He's been our buddy before, he'll be our buddy again.

Never mind that we tried to kill him, that's just business. I must say that he seems to be remarkably hard to kill, a very durable fellow.

[AngryAmish]

2. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar wins name of the year

Say his name 10 times fast. I dare you.

[htuttle]

4. I think Hekmatyar has been allied with every faction in Afghanistan at one point or another

(cue Farsi version of 'My Way')

[oblivious]

5. The changing loyalties there make my head spin. Take the 'father of the Taliban' Samiul Haq

He was, according to this report, at the farewell luncheon in honour of US ambassador to Pakistan Ryan C. Crocker.


PAKISTAN: 'FATHER OF TALIBAN' CALLS FOR ITALIAN JOURNALIST'S RELEASE
Karachi, 8 March (AKI) - (by Syed Saleem Shahzad) -

...The Pakistani political leader has been dubbed the "father of the Taliban" - a reference to the fact that top ranking Talibans, including their fugitive leader, Mullah Omar, once studied in an Islamic seminary run by Samiul Haq in the town of Akora Khattak in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP) which borders Afghanistan.

Samiul Haq leads the six-party Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) which in the past has been highly critical of Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf because of his support for the United States' 'war against terrorism', including the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan which toppled the Taliban.

However, the MMA which is the ruling political group in the North West Frontier Province has recently softened its anti-Musharraf and anti-Washington stance.

Bearing evidence of the MMA's more moderate approach was Maulana Samiul Haq's presence on Thursday at the farewell luncheon in honour of US ambassador Ryan C. Crocker who is leaving Pakistan to take up his new posting in Baghdad.

At the lucheon the Chairman of Pakistan's Senate Foreign Relations Committee, jokingly adressed Samiul Haq as a "friendly fundamentalist" and "former terrorist".
http://www.adnki.com/index_2Level_English.php?cat=Security&loid=8.0.393048330&par=0