Optimistic Afghan Opposition Expects Mass Taliban Defections

After years of stalemated civil war in Afghanistan, the opposition to the ruling Taliban is increasingly confident of ridding the country of its radical Islamic leadership.

The Taliban has held power since 1996, when it ousted President Burhanuddin Rabbani’s government. On Wednesday, as U.S. forces continued deploying for possible military strikes on the country, Rabbani’s foreign minister described scenes of chaos in the capital, Kabul, and predicted sweeping defections from the Taliban in coming weeks.

Already, many Taliban fighters want to defect to the opposition, said the foreign minister, Abdullah, who uses only one name. He said his government has a plan to use them in its bid to retake control.

Abdullah said that consultations between Rabbani’s representatives and U.S. officials were intensifying but that he had no knowledge of when any American military action against Taliban-held areas of Afghanistan might begin.

However, there is an air of edgy anticipation among Rabbani government officials in northern Afghanistan, who have told journalists that U.S. military strikes could start any day.

“Our contacts [with the U.S.] are continuing and have increased, and we have made our points clear about our position in regards to the new situation, and they know about our capacity and our capabilities,” Abdullah said, speaking in English at a news conference for foreign journalists in this town north of Kabul.

He hinted that his government was briefing the U.S. on potential military targets.

According to Abdullah, Kabul would not be the first target for Rabbani’s Northern Alliance forces. He spelled out a possible international strategy if the Taliban falls: Demilitarize Kabul and bring in U.N. peacekeepers.

“In my opinion, it is very important to increase the role of the U.N. at this stage. I think if the Taliban forces are defeated somehow in the coming days or weeks, the issue of Kabul will become even more important because of the vacuum that will be left behind,” he said.

“Measures could be taken at that time--for example, demilitarization of Kabul or having just a small number of security personnel and asking the United Nations to play a peacekeeping role,” he said.

According to Abdullah, there has been increasing communication between the Northern Alliance and disloyal members of the Taliban who are eager to defect.

“If we open the gate, there will be defections on a daily basis. But we are working on a larger plan in that regard, and those contacts are important for us,” he said.

The Northern Alliance forces suffered a serious setback with the assassination of military leader Ahmed Shah Masoud by suicide bombers this month. But U.S. threats of military action against the Taliban for harboring Osama bin Laden, the man suspected of masterminding the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S., have dramatically shifted the odds in Afghanistan’s 12-year civil war.

Abdullah welcomed Russia’s announcement Monday of support for the Rabbani government and its forces, but he said there had been no explicit offer of U.S. support.

“We haven’t asked for specific types of support,” he said.

“The international community has ignored the situation in Afghanistan for so long. We are fighting against forces that are against the people of Afghanistan, and now the world has decided to fight against them. And so we are not only fighting our own enemies but against the enemies of humanity as a whole,” Abdullah said.

“Our cause is a legitimate cause, and in our legitimate cause we deserve support from the international community, although we haven’t received any support from the United States.”

Abdullah said he had intelligence showing that several Bin Laden bodyguards were in Jalalabad, east of Kabul, on Tuesday. But there was no information about where Bin Laden was.

The Taliban has increased its military presence north of Kabul to guard against an attack from the Northern Alliance, Abdullah said.

“So it shows their worries about this front. The battle of Kabul will depend on the circumstances as a whole--what will be the kind of operations that the United States will launch, what will be the Taliban’s measures to lessen the impact of that operation,” he said.

The Taliban is afraid of an uprising in the event of U.S. attacks, Abdullah said, and he claimed that the local population recently joined Northern Alliance forces to push the Taliban out of the Qades district in the country’s northwest.

He also said the Northern Alliance has pushed into strategic points near Taloqan in the northeast.