Bush Says No to New Taliban Offer for Talks

As warplanes began a second week of attacks over Afghanistan, President Bush curtly rejected a new proposal Sunday from the Taliban regime to negotiate conditions for handing over Osama bin Laden.

“This is nonnegotiable,” Bush said. “There’s nothing to negotiate. They’re harboring a terrorist. They need to turn him over.”

The president spoke in response to a proposal from the Afghan regime’s deputy prime minister, Haji Abdul Kabir. Kabir, one of the most powerful figures in the Taliban, said in Jalalabad that if Bush halted the air attacks and provided evidence that Bin Laden was behind the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, the Taliban would discuss sending him to a third country.

Bin Laden’s dispatch “can be negotiated,” Kabir said at a news conference, according to news agency reports from Afghanistan, “provided the U.S. gives us evidence and the Taliban are assured that the country is neutral and will not be influenced by the United States.”

But Bush said, “When I said no negotiations, I meant no negotiations.”

The long-distance exchange amounted to a standoff, as U.S. aircraft struck near the front line of the civil war in Afghanistan and other targets in the nation. Reports emerging from the country indicated that the Taliban was struggling to hold ground against the opposition Northern Alliance. Recently, the Taliban has controlled about 90% to 95% of the country; the Northern Alliance has held the rest.

Kabir’s comments indicated that the U.S.-led military campaign is exerting pressure on the Taliban. He may have made the proposal to suggest to the world that the regime is making an effort to resolve the conflict.

This morning, three powerful explosions rocked Jalalabad as a lone jet streaked across the sky and dropped at least three bombs, Associated Press reported. Taliban gunners responded with antiaircraft fire.

The explosions appeared to come from the western edge of the city, which has been the subject of sustained U.S. strikes over the past week.

U.S. jets also flew over Kabul this morning and dropped at least one bomb in the northern part of the capital, drawing fire from Taliban antiaircraft guns.

On Sunday, the war continued to roil neighboring Pakistan, where an anti-American demonstration in the city of Jacobabad drew fire from police. One protester was killed.

Seeking to shore up the United States’ position with Pakistan and to head off conflict between Pakistan and India, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell set off Sunday on a trip to both countries.

Pakistan has long been wary of instability in Afghanistan, and it now fears that domestic support for the fundamentalist Taliban could destabilize its own government.

According to Afghan refugees in Uzbekistan who made telephone contact Sunday with relatives in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, the Northern Alliance was continuing to make gains in its battle with the Taliban.

The anti-Taliban forces reportedly encircled the town of Aibak, the administrative center of Samangan province south of Mazar-i-Sharif. About 2,500 Taliban fighters remain in Aibak; they are cut off from the main Taliban-held territory to the south and are running low on fuel, food and ammunition, the Mazar-i-Sharif residents said.

The U.S.-led bombing raids have killed between 30 and 50 Taliban fighters, but no civilians in Mazar-i-Sharif, the residents said. The reports could not be verified independently.

The Northern Alliance’s foreign minister, Abdullah, said an advance against Kabul, the capital, was being delayed until an agreement is reached on who will govern Afghanistan if the Taliban falls.

In an interview Sunday with the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security advisor, said the United States is taking part in talks focused on just that issue.

“We are engaged in discussions with other countries and with the United Nations about what the future of Afghanistan might be,” she said. “America cannot choose the future government of Afghanistan. Only the Afghan people can choose the future government of Afghanistan.”

Pressed on when the bombing would bring the Taliban’s downfall, she begged for patience, saying, “Let’s give this a little time.

“You see that the Taliban is losing, every day, military assets. That’s a victory. This is going to be a long campaign, but eventually we are going to win this struggle,” she said.

Countering arguments that the conflict could turn into a war between the West and Islam, seemingly sought by Bin Laden, she said: “What Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda have stimulated is a stronger America, is a strong international coalition against terrorism. And that includes many states in the Middle East and in the Muslim world.”

One day after a bomb from a U.S. plane mistakenly hit a village instead of a grounded helicopter, U.S. aircraft were pounding targets throughout the country on the eighth day of the air campaign, the Pentagon said.

Without providing details, it said pilots sought Taliban troops and units of Al Qaeda, the Bin Laden terrorist network with which the Taliban is allied.

As they have been for several days, pilots were given discretion to seek targets on their own, without guidance from military headquarters, said Col. Ken McLellan, a Pentagon spokesman.

“They’ve graduated to the point now where they are not just going after fixed targets, but after targets of opportunity, so if they see a cave opening or a troop concentration they will strike,” McLellan said.

He said pilots were targeting Taliban command and control facilities, Al Qaeda training camps, early-warning radar installations, surface-to-air missiles, airfields, aircraft, ground forces and leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

In the Arabian Sea, Navy jets were launched again off the deck of the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson--after pilots watched video replays of the attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. The United States says Bin Laden was the mastermind behind the attack.

“You can probably tell we’re getting tired,” shrugged a 34-year-old pilot from northern Virginia who is known by the radio call name Dirty. The pilot, like others aboard the ship, could not be identified by his name, under Navy rules established to protect family members ashore.

“Everyone’s got bags under their eyes,” he said.

Indeed, every fighter pilot on the carrier has been dispatched to the Afghan skies, and many have made the arduous trip day after day.

Dirty said he spent Sunday on a mission that blew up a military storage facility in the mountains outside an Afghan city he did not identify.

In Washington, Bush returned from a weekend at Camp David, Md. As he walked from his Marine One helicopter to the White House entrance, he paused to reject out of hand the Taliban proposal. On other afternoons when he has returned from the presidential retreat, he has ignored reporters’ questions. But on Sunday he spoke up, with a blunt response to the idea that he and the Taliban might have something to talk about if the bombing stops and he provides proof of Bin Laden’s complicity in the terror attacks:

“Turn him over and his colleagues and the thugs he hides as well as destroy his camps,” Bush said. “There’s no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he’s guilty.”

The president also demanded that the Taliban release “the innocent people being held hostage in Afghanistan.” This was a reference to eight foreign aid workers, including two Americans, held there since August. They have been charged with trying to convert Muslims to Christianity, which is strictly forbidden.

In a speech videotaped two weeks after the attacks but delivered Sunday to a convention of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, Bush pressed ahead with his domestic policy agenda, seeking support for pending legislation intended to protect patients’ rights in seeking medical treatment.

“The business of our nation goes forward,” he said. “We will win the war on terrorism, and we will also continue to fight important battles at home.”

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Times staff writers Richard C. Paddock in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Megan K. Stack aboard the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson in the Arabian Sea, and Esther Schrader in Washington contributed to this report.