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U.S. Official Meets with Taliban Envoy to Pakistan
ISLAMABAD, Aug 2 (News Agencies) - A top U.S. envoy met Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan in Islamabad Thursday in the highest-level contact so far between an official of the Islamic state and U.S. President George W. Bush's administration, U.S. officials said.
Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca met Ambassador Abdul Salam Zaeef, Taliban's top diplomat posted abroad, near the end of the South Asia secretary's visit to Pakistan.
For its part, the U.S. supports U.N. sanctions against the Taliban for its alleged sponsorship of "terrorism" and does not recognize the state, which has formal ties only with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
In particular, the U.S. is demanding the extradition of Saudi-born millionaire Osama bin Laden, wanted in the United States on alleged "terrorism" charges but sheltered in Afghanistan as a "guest" of the Taliban.
Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Rocca said "I reiterated that the monitoring mechanism and the sanctions themselves would not be necessary if the Taliban simply complied with the resolutions by closing terrorist training camps and sending Osama bin Laden to a country where he can be brought to justice."
She added that she also discussed U.S. humanitarian aid to Afghanistan and the Taliban's recent ban on poppy cultivation.
During the meeting, Rocca pledged $1.5 million to help U.N. drug-control efforts in Afghanistan in response to the Taliban's ban on poppy cultivation.
She said the money would be spent through the United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP) to help farmers forced to burn their lucrative opium crops.
"The Taliban appear to have effectively enforced a ban on poppy cultivation in the areas under its control," she said in a statement released after her meeting with the Taliban's ambassador to neighboring Pakistan.
"We welcome the Taliban's enforcement of the ban and hope it will be sustained," she added, stressing that the money would not be given to the Taliban itself.
Until last year, Afghanistan was the world's largest producer of opium, which is harvested from poppy buds and forms the raw ingredient of heroin.
Then, in the same year, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar declared that the harvesting of opium was un-Islamic and must be stopped.
While the move resulted in the almost total eradication of poppy fields from Taliban-controlled areas, aid workers expressed concern that foreign donors were not doing enough to help Afghan farmers rebuild their incomes.
"It is important for the international community to assist the farmers who have felt the impact of the poppy ban," Rocca said.
"These farmers have few options as Afghanistan is in the midst of a humanitarian crisis brought about by over 20 years of conflict and drought."
The meeting coincides with stepped-up U.S. efforts to build international agreement over the alleged threat the Taliban and bin Laden pose to global security.
The United Nations Security Council this week moved to toughen sanctions against the Taliban, including an arms embargo, by setting up monitoring teams in the six neighboring nations.
"This is not just. We are not criminals, and I will speak with her on this issue," Zaeef was quoted telling the Nation newspaper here Thursday.
The Taliban foreign ministry in Kabul has said, "[T]he so called embargoes monitoring delegation will be treated as an enemy."
The mostly political, aviation and financial curbs were imposed in 1999 and January of this year for the Taliban's refusal to extradite bin Laden, suspected of planning two U.S. embassy bombings in Africa in 1998, which killed 224 people.
Rocca has previously met the foreign minister of the Northern Alliance, a coalition of armed groups that have been fighting the Taliban since they took control of Kabul in 1996.
More than 800,000 Afghans have fled their homes due to war and drought since September last year.
The United States is the largest bilateral humanitarian aid donor to Afghanistan, but the Taliban accuses it of worsening the crisis with sanctions that strangle the economy and hamper relief efforts.
During her visit to Pakistan, Rocca saw the grim realities of war and drought in Afghanistan as she visited a makeshift refugee camp Wednesday, officials said.
She visited the sprawling Jalozai camp on the outskirts of Peshawar, near the Afghan border in northwestern Pakistan, where more than 70,000 Afghans are living in squalid misery.
Dotted by torn plastic tents on a treeless plain, Jalozai has been the point of arrival for some 200,000 Afghans fleeing drought and war in their homeland.
Hundreds of people, mostly children, have died of preventable illnesses in the settlement since then, despite U.N. food aid and the reopening of a proper refugee camp nearby to handle the influx of desperate families.
Rocca is on her first visit to Pakistan since assuming her post in Washington earlier this year.
On Tuesday she met Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar and Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz.
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