Pakistan Warns U.S. Against Helping Afghan Rebels

Any use of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance rebels to defeat the country’s Taliban government would be “a recipe for disaster,” Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdus Sattar said Tuesday.

The comments at a news briefing were the most explicit public warning yet by the Pakistani government that it would not go along with a possible plan by the United States to use the forces of the late rebel leader Ahmed Shah Masoud to try to dislodge the Taliban.

The idea that the U.S. could use the northern forces has been floating around since the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. The temptation has grown because the alliance is mounting an offensive that has brought it to within 22 miles of Kabul, the Afghan capital.

On Friday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said he thought the Northern Alliance “can be useful in a variety of ways.”

From the Pakistani viewpoint, however, the Northern Alliance could not provide a stable permanent government because it does not include the Pushtun ethnic group that is dominant in Afghanistan, and therefore it would inevitably be weak and result in further internal conflict and instability.

Sattar warned that any such government imposed with outside help would be deemed illegitimate by most Afghans.

“We fear any such decision on the part of foreign powers to give assistance to one group or the other is a recipe for great suffering for the people of Afghanistan,” Sattar said after a meeting with a group of visiting European Union ministers.

Because of the military threat from its ongoing strategic rivalry with India to its east, Pakistan has long sought to have a stable and friendly government in Afghanistan to its west, officials here say.

The Northern Alliance is dominated by ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks and Afghan’s Shia minority, and it is believed to have had material support from Russia and Iran and close relations with India’s secret service. A victory by the alliance would be seen as a setback for Pakistan’s regional security interests.

Most experts on the Taliban, which rules most of Afghanistan, believe it was strongly aided in its drive to power in the mid-1990s by Pakistan’s secret services, which sought to ensure a stable and friendly government in Kabul. Pakistan continues to deny the allegations, however.

Analysts here have warned that any hint of Washington helping the Northern Alliance could be counterproductive because it could unite Taliban forces. There are fears in Afghanistan that the alliance would wage a blood bath if it succeeded militarily, to pay the Taliban back for alleged massacres and Masoud’s assassination this month.