Ousted Afghan Pessimistic About Peace

Afghanistan’s deposed military chief warned Friday that Taliban rebels were only engaging in peace talks to buy time to rearm for a fresh assault.

At his first press conference since being driven out of Kabul on Sept. 27, Ahmed Shah Massood called the Taliban fighters an occupation force imposed on Afghanistan by neighboring Pakistan.

Pakistan’s interior minister, Nasrullah Babar, has been shuttling between the Taliban and northern warlord Gen. Rashid Dostum to try to broker a peace agreement.

Earlier this month, Dostum and Massood agreed to join forces against the Taliban, forming an alliance with two other minority parties. Dostum sent hundreds of troops and Soviet-made tanks to the front Thursday to join Massood’s army.

“Kabul has initiated these talks with Dostum in an effort to break the alliance . . . and also to give time to the Taliban to rearm and build up for their next big offensive,” Massood said at his headquarters in Jebul Siraj, about 60 miles north of Kabul, the capital.

Sitting cross-legged on a cement floor, Massood insisted the Taliban’s brand of Islam was alien to Afghanistan and rejected by most Afghans.

“The Taliban has lost more by winning Kabul because they have proved themselves to be unpopular,” he said. “They have lost support of the people. . . . The Islamic fundamentalism is not popular among Afghans.”

Since taking power in Kabul, the new Taliban rulers have moved quickly to impose their interpretation of Islam, preventing women from working, closing girls’ schools and forcing men to wear beards and skullcaps or turbans.

Massood, an ethnic Tajik, rarely smiled as he warned of fresh fighting and spoke pessimistically about the peace talks.

“We are ready to talk, but we are not optimistic . . . because of the presence of foreign powers,” he said. “In the past, it was Russia and now it is Pakistan.”

In the 1980s, Muslim insurgents battled invading Soviet troops, forcing their withdrawal in 1989. The Moscow-backed Communist regime was overthrown three years later in 1992.

Wearing his trademark green khaki jacket and wool cap, Massood said, “The people of Afghanistan hate the Taliban more than the Russians.”

He said his soldiers have captured several Pakistani prisoners and were holding them in the mountains of the Hindu Kush range.

Wounded villagers arriving in the Afghan capital Friday reported a ferocious rocket duel between Taliban and ex-government troops outside the military air force base at Baghram, about 30 miles north of Kabul.

Eight seriously wounded refugees were being treated at Kabul’s Karte Se hospital.

Mohammed Yahya chain-smoked Friday while waiting for news about his young nephew, wounded in a Taliban bombing raid at Rabat, a cluster of mud huts a mile north of Baghram.

“There was heavy fighting in our village, with tanks and heavy artillery and many people fled into the mountains,” he said. “Then we heard planes overhead and the next thing we saw were bombs dropping down.”

The International Red Cross reported scores of casualties on the front line.

A guerrilla-style war being waged by ousted government troops has been successful in stopping the Taliban advance north.

Taliban fighters, who moved quickly into Kabul and about 90 miles beyond, to the Panjshir Valley, were pushed back more than a week ago to just beyond the military air base at Baghram.

Dostum, who commands the second-largest fighting force in Afghanistan after the Taliban, wants to create a national coalition that would include the Taliban army and the ousted government.