Taliban Asks Clerics to Rule On Surrender Of Bin Laden

By Molly Moore and Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, September 18, 2001; Page A01

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sept. 17 -- Pakistani officials sent to Afghanistan to seek the surrender of Osama bin Laden extended their visit today after Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia said a council of Islamic clerics would decide whether to hand over the suspected terrorist.

The official Taliban radio said the Islamic movement's leader, Mohammad Omar, had decided that the fate of bin Laden should be decided by the group of senior clerics, who will meet Tuesday in the Afghan capital, Kabul. The Pakistanis, who met with Omar today in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, traveled to Kabul to await the decision. Bin Laden has been identified as the prime suspect behind last week's terror attacks in New York and Washington.

The Pakistani delegation headed by Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, who met last week with high-level U.S. officials, spent more than three hours with Taliban leaders, according to Taliban spokesman Abdul Hai Mutmaen. The Pakistanis reportedly told the Taliban that giving up bin Laden, whom it has harbored for the last five years, could spare Afghanistan from military attack by the United States.

"Time is short, patience has run out," Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdus Sattar said the delegation told the Taliban. "There is no room for negotiations. It's time for action."

In recent years, bin Laden has become increasingly influential within the Taliban, providing the radical Islamic group with funding and weapons for its effort to seize the last pockets of Afghanistan it does not control. One Pakistani official here said it would be "a miracle" if the Taliban surrendered a man who has become not only its benefactor but a hero in parts of the Muslim world.

Taliban officials have said repeatedly they will protect bin Laden unless presented with proof of his involvement in the attacks. They have warned they will attack any country that supports a U.S. assault, including Pakistan.

In Pakistan and other countries bordering Afghanistan, tensions were rising in anticipation of a U.S. military strike.

Pakistani Muslim groups denounced U.S. efforts to capture bin Laden and promised violence if Afghanistan is attacked. Russia met with representatives of other former Soviet republics in Central Asia to coordinate their responses to the U.S. appeal for assistance. And weapons and combatants from Afghanistan and Pakistan were converging on the border in increasing numbers.

Pakistan's agreement to assist the United States has provoked increasing outcry inside Pakistan, where bin Laden's appeal runs strong.

In the city of Lahore, leaders of a coalition of 35 Islamic groups warned today that the United States would be taking on "the entire Muslim world" if it attacks Afghanistan. The Afghan and Pakistan Defense Council, which represents a broad spectrum Sunni Muslim factions, said it would declare a "holy war" to defend Afghan and Pakistani sovereignty if such an attack comes.

"I wish from my heart that President Bush does not do a wrong thing" by attacking Afghanistan, said Sami ul-Haq, the coalition's chairman and leader of a pro-Taliban religious party. "There are 1.3 billion Muslims in the world. Will America take on all of them to go after just one Arab?"

Speakers at the Lahore meeting condemned the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. But they denied that Muslims were responsible and blamed the attacks on Israeli and Jewish interests, which they asserted seek to provoke a cataclysmic confrontation between the West and the Muslim world, and to distract attention from what they called Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories.

"This is an attempt to accelerate the clash of civilizations," said Qazi Hussain Ahmed, leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, a mainstream religious party that claims nearly 5 million followers across Pakistan. "Islam is spreading fast in the West, and this is an attempt to stop it. The only ones who benefit from this attack are not Muslims but Zionists. We must not fall into this trap." He called on all Islamic groups at the meeting to form a "wall of steel" to defend Pakistan's interests.

Religious fervor also was evident in towns and villages across northern Pakistan's Baluchistan and North-West Frontier provinces, according to military intelligence reports described today by a senior military official. Armed tribal groups sympathetic to the Taliban are mobilizing in the two large provinces, which share a border with Afghanistan, according to the military reports.

The border region, where many Pakistanis share the ethnic Pashtun culture and severe interpretation of Islam with the Taliban, has some of the largest arms bazaars in the world. Local tribal chiefs closely associated with the Taliban are ordering their supporters to arm themselves and prepare to assist the Taliban against foreign attacks, according to a senior military official.

Throughout Central Asia, countries were tightening border security. Pakistan has closed its most critical border crossing with Afghanistan, at Torkham near the Khyber Pass, in an effort to shut off the flow of Afghan refugees.

A Pakistani officer told the Reuters news agency that the Taliban had massed up to 25,000 fighters armed with Scud missiles in positions near the border. "We fear they may attack us, but we will defend the motherland," Capt. Abid Bahtti, of the paramilitary Khyber Rifles, told reporters at a checkpoint in the Khyber Pass.

Along Afghanistan's northern border, where the former Soviet republics of Central Asia also are bracing for possible hostilities, Russia held high-level talks aimed at influencing what kind of cooperation -- if any -- those nations will offer to the United States.

Russian President Vladimir Putin consulted by phone with five Central Asian leaders and then dispatched his top security adviser, Vladimir Rushailo, to the region for talks on how to coordinate their response to the threat of war in the region.

Two countries -- Uzbekistan and Georgia -- have signaled willingness to help the United States launch strikes, while Tajikistan and Turkmenistan have been more circumspect, warning of a possible refugee crisis and other negative consequences of an attack and suggesting they are not willing to serve as a staging ground for U.S. forces.

Russia's position remains unclear. U.S. Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton told reporters in Moscow after meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov that he had discussed possible help from Central Asia with his counterparts. "I don't think they've ruled anything in or anything out," he said.

Over the weekend, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov strongly discouraged any attempts by the United States to use Central Asia as a launching pad for an assault on Afghanistan. Russia remains a major player in the region, particularly in Tajikistan, a major ally of the Afghan opposition fighting Taliban rule. Russia has 10,000 troops guarding Tajikistan's volatile border with Afghanistan.

Constable reported from Lahore. Special correspondent Kamran Khan in Islamabad and correspondent Susan B. Glasser in Moscow contributed to this report.