U.S. Warning Alliance to Ease Drive for Power

Concerned that Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance is aggressively consolidating power, the Bush administration urged the opposition force Saturday to yield to the United Nations and install a broad-based government representing the country’s multiple ethnic groups, an administration official said.

But even as the administration issued its warning, the Northern Alliance’s political leader returned to the Afghan capital, Kabul, despite earlier assurances that he would stay out of the city for several weeks. His return Saturday suggested that he and his allies were positioning themselves to become at least the core of a new Afghan government.

President Bush, at his ranch here, met in a video conference with the National Security Council on a day in which the first phase of the U.S.-led campaign to disrupt and dismantle the Al Qaeda terror network appeared to be speeding toward a peak, with American forces engaged in combat on the ground and the Northern Alliance in control of a wide swath of Afghanistan.

Bush spent the morning focusing on the next steps in the campaign, administration officials said, and particularly on the need to make sure that political elements in Afghanistan are brought into play.

Burhanuddin Rabbani, who claimed to be the country’s legitimate president during the more than five years that the Taliban controlled Kabul, returned Saturday to a capital seized by the Northern Alliance last week.

The government of Rabbani, a 61-year-old former theology professor, still controls Afghanistan’s seat at the United Nations because the world body never recognized the Taliban as legitimate.

Rabbani’s Jamiat-i-Islami party is the leading faction in the Northern Alliance. But it is dominated by ethnic Tajiks--Rabbani is Tajik--and there are already signs of differences with alliance partners, among them a faction representing ethnic Hazaras.

The Northern Alliance continued to insist that it wants to share power in a broad-based government, to avoid a renewed civil war in a country that has endured more than two decades of fighting.

“We have not come to Kabul to extend our government,” Rabbani assured reporters. “We came to Kabul for peace. We are preparing the ground to invite peace groups and all Afghan intellectuals abroad who are working for peace.”

But efforts to bring lasting peace to Afghanistan were becoming more complicated by the day. The degree of Taliban losses--and Northern Alliance gains--in southern Afghanistan was not clear, and among the political factions and militias, leaders and would-be leaders were scrambling for control.

Reports a day earlier that the Taliban was willing to hand over power to tribal leaders in the southern city of Kandahar, the spiritual birthplace of the Taliban, appeared Saturday to be premature.

In southern Afghanistan, a Taliban official confirmed that Mohammed Atef, a chief Al Qaeda military strategist, died three days ago, along with seven other Al Qaeda members, during a U.S. airstrike near Kabul. Atef was a top lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, and authorities believe that he helped plan the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.

Conflicting Reports on Bin Laden Whereabouts

From Afghanistan to Washington, meanwhile, conflicting reports emerged on the whereabouts of Bin Laden.

In Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, a correspondent for the widely watched pan-Arab television network Al Jazeera quoted the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef, as saying that Bin Laden had left Afghanistan “with his wives and children.”

The Associated Press said Zaeef reported that Bin Laden had crossed into Pakistan. But later, the envoy told reporters he believed that the Saudi militant had only left a Taliban-controlled area.

In Washington, a well-placed U.S. official said that “we have no evidence to substantiate claims that Bin Laden has fled Afghanistan.”

And a Pentagon spokesman, Glenn Flood, said Zaeef’s statements might be an attempt to throw off the widening hunt for Bin Laden.

The efforts by the administration on the political front Saturday reflect the goal, pursued on several tracks, that the Northern Alliance does not become so entrenched that power cannot be wrested from it before a representative authority is established.

After Bush’s National Security Council meeting, an administration official said, “We have made clear to the Northern Alliance, and will continue to make clear to them, that whatever government is put in place by the Afghan people has to be broad-based and multiethnic, and it is important that the needs of the Afghan people are met.”

And, the official said, the new government must include a component addressing economic development and humanitarian needs--much in the way that the United States and its coalition partners are trying to make sure that food is being provided and other humanitarian needs met in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, one of the first cities to come under Northern Alliance control.

The administration official, who asked not to be identified, said the success of the military track had heightened pressure to ensure that the “ultimate outcome of the political track” brings such a coalition government into place, under some sort of U.N. authority.

The United States’ message to the disparate parties in Afghanistan is being carried by James Dobbins, the recently named envoy to Central Asia. He is also working to get leading commanders and ethnic Pushtun elders mobilized to balance the Northern Alliance.

Because they make up 40% of Afghanistan’s population, the Pushtuns’ participation is essential to meet U.N. requirements of a broad-based coalition government.

The Northern Alliance is a coalition of minorities, including ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras.

Because the United States has yielded to the United Nations the primary political role in establishing a post-Taliban government, it now lacks leverage in mediating among Afghanistan’s disparate groups.

However, Washington is making clear that any hopes for reconstructing Afghanistan, including the dispatch of hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid, would hinge on an acceptable reconciliation among the ethnic, religious and tribal groups.

Bush Hopes Support for War Keeps Up

Bush, who has made no public appearance since Thursday, when he spoke at a high school gymnasium with visiting Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, has taken pains to not let public support for the anti-terror campaign slacken with the sudden erosion of the Taliban’s control in Afghanistan.

“It’s an important point for everybody to keep in mind: The military objective is to destroy Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but it is also important to remember there are Al Qaeda cells in more than 60 countries,” the administration official said. “By no means is the war on terrorism over just because you meet your objective in Afghanistan.”

That doesn’t mean, however, that the administration is about to begin military action elsewhere. Although officials have said that they consider any country harboring terrorists as much a target as the terrorists themselves, they also have made clear that financial and other pressures could be applied on targeted nations, and not just military pressure.

On the military front, what had appeared just a day ago as an impending denouement to the campaign across southern Afghanistan appeared much less certain Saturday.

Taliban efforts to broker a deal with local ethnic Pushtun elders and tribal leaders on surrendering Kandahar reportedly began five to six days ago as the Taliban forces began to retreat throughout much of northern Afghanistan. The southern part of Afghanistan is dominated by the Pushtuns.

The Taliban is also predominantly Pushtun, and most tribal leaders say they would accept in their community the average Afghan Taliban foot soldier, who is essentially their own flesh and blood. But a deeper animus exists toward Taliban leaders and non-Afghan fighters who joined the movement.

The Taliban reportedly is ready to turn over Kandahar in return for sparing the large numbers of their fighters in the city. Many of these fighters arrived only recently after fleeing the military collapse in the north.

A U.S. defense official said the military situation remained in flux around Kandahar and the northern city of Kunduz, where the largest concentration of Taliban and Al Qaeda forces remain. In both places, the official said, non-Afghan fighters who fear they would not survive a surrender are trying to force their Afghan comrades to keep fighting.

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Gerstenzang reported from Texas and Watson from Kabul. Times staff writers Alissa J. Rubin in Quetta, Pakistan; Tyler Marshall in Islamabad; and Paul Richter and Robin Wright in Washington contributed to this report.