Taliban against the ropes/brokering peace?

The Taliban have been engaged in secret talks about ending the conflict in Afghanistan in a wide-ranging 'peace process' sponsored by Saudi Arabia and supported by Britain, The Observer can reveal.

The unprecedented negotiations involve a senior former member of the hardline Islamist movement travelling between Kabul, the bases of the Taliban senior leadership in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and European capitals. Britain has provided logistic and diplomatic support for the talks - despite official statements that negotiations can be held only with Taliban who are ready to renounce, or have renounced, violence.

Sources in Afghanistan confirmed the controversial talks, though they said that in recent weeks they had 'lost momentum'. According to Afghan government officials in Kabul, the intensity of the fighting this summer has been one factor. Another is the inconsistency of the Taliban's demands.

'They keep changing what they are asking for. One day it is one thing, the next another,' one Afghan government adviser with knowledge of the negotiations said. One aim of the initiative is to drive a wedge between Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Last week the French Prime Minister, François Fillon, referred indirectly to the talks during a parliamentary debate on Afghanistan. 'We must explore ways of separating the international jihadists from those who are acting more for nationalist or tribal motives. Efforts in this direction are being led by Sunni [Muslim] countries such as Saudi Arabia,' he said.

This summer's fighting season in Afghanistan has been the most violent since the invasion of 2001. The deterioration of the situation has provoked a major review of strategy among the 40-nation international coalition pitted against an increasingly confident and effective insurgency.

Although there have been low-level contacts with individual Taliban commanders at district level before, the Saudi initiative is the first attempt to talk to the Taliban leadership council based in or around the south-west Pakistan city of Quetta, known as the 'Quetta Shura'.

The talks started in the summer and have been brokered by Saudi Arabia at the invitation of the Afghan government. The go-between has spent weeks ferrying lists of demands and counter-demands between the Afghan capital, Riyadh and Quetta. He has also visited London to speak to Foreign Office and MI6 personnel. A delegation from Saudi intelligence has also visited Kabul.

The Taliban are understood to have submitted a list of 11 conditions for ending hostilities, which include demands to be allowed to run key ministries and a programmed withdrawal of western troops.

In Kabul, President Hamid Karzai's national security adviser, Zalmay Rasul, has been in charge of the negotiations. It is understood that Karzai has yet to make a formal response to the demands, leading to frustration among some western officials.

The Observer has also learnt of a separate exchange of letters in the summer between Karzai and the Taliban ally Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The dialogue proved fruitless.

Late last year Karzai said he would welcome the chance to speak directly to Hekmatyar and to Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's leader and one of the most wanted men in the world, promising that if the Taliban demanded a 'department in this or in that ministry or ... a position as deputy minister' in exchange for ending violence, he would give them the posts.

Previously Taliban spokesmen have said that only the departure of foreign troops, the institution of a fiercely rigorous interpretation of sharia law and a share of government would be acceptable to them as the basis for any deal.

A Foreign Office spokesman said yesterday that he had no knowledge of the 'Saudi initiative', as it is known in diplomatic circles, but that the British government 'actively supported the Afghan government's reconciliation process', which was 'part and parcel of the counter-insurgency campaign'.

In another development, The Observer has learnt that the British government is considering increasing the length of tours served by troops in Afghanistan. The Ministry of Defence confirmed last week that tours for senior soldiers in key command positions are set to be extended from six months to a year.

'We are looking at increasing tour lengths for a small number of headquarters posts ... with the aim of creating greater continuity in key positions,' an MoD spokesman said.

Although the MoD denied any plans to extend other service personnel's combat tours in Afghanistan, the idea of troops deployed to the area serving nine months was raised recently by the army's director of infantry, Brigadier Richard Dennis, in a speech to senior commanders.

Washington is putting pressure on Nato allies such as Britain to match American troop increases.

60 Minutes: Kill Osama Bin Laden

An eye opening interview with a Special Forces Commando about the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

(CBS) Shortly after 9/11, the Pentagon ordered a top secret team of American commandos into Afghanistan with a single, simple order: kill Osama bin Laden. It was America's best chance to eliminate the leader of al Qaeda. The inside story of exactly what happened in that mission, and how close it came to its objective has never been told until now.

The man you are about to meet was the officer in command, leading a team from the U.S. Army's mysterious Delta Force - a unit so secret, it's often said Delta doesn't exist. But you are about to see Delta's operators in action.

Why would the mission commander break his silence after seven years? He told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley that most everything he has read in the media about his mission is wrong and now he wants to set the record straight.


"Our job was to go find him, capture or kill him, and we knew the writing on the wall was to kill him because nobody wanted to bring Osama bin Laden back to stand trial in the United States somewhere," the mission commander tells Pelley.

In 2001, just 10 weeks after 9/11, he was a 37-year-old Army major leading a team of America's most elite commandos. Even now, 60 Minutes can't tell you his name or show you his face. 60 Minutes hired a theatrical make up artist to take this former Delta officer through a series of transformations to disguise him. He calls himself "Dalton Fury," and is the author of "Kill Bin Laden," a new book out this week.

Dalton Fury is used to disguises. In fact in 2001, his entire team transformed themselves in Afghanistan. "Everybody has their beard grown. Everybody’s wearing local Afghan clothing, sometimes carrying the same weapons as them," he explains.

"The idea was that if this all worked out Osama bin Laden would be dead, and no one would ever know that Delta Force was there?" Pelley asks.

"That's right," Fury says. "That's the plan. And that always is when you're talking about Delta Force."

And there was no mission more important to the United States. "We'll smoke him out of his cave and we'll get him eventually," President Bush had vowed.

But the administration's strategy was to let Afghans do most of the fighting. Using radio intercepts and other intelligence, the CIA pinpointed bin Laden in the mountains near the border of Pakistan. Following the strategy of keeping an Afghan face on the war, Fury's Delta team joined the CIA and Afghan fighters and piled into pickup trucks. They videotaped their journey to a place called Tora Bora.

Fury told 60 Minutes his orders were to kill bin Laden and leave the body with the Afghans.

"Right here you're looking at basically the battlefield from the last location that we had a firm on Osama bin Laden's location," Fury explains to Pelley, looking at a ridgeline with an elevation of about 14,000 feet.

Asked how tough it would be to attack such a position on a scale of one to ten, Fury tells Pelley, "In my experience it’s a ten."

Delta developed an audacious plan to come at bin Laden from the one direction he would never expect.

"We want to come in on the back door," Fury explains. "The original plan that we sent up through our higher headquarters, Delta Force wants to come in over the mountain with oxygen, coming from the Pakistan side, over the mountains and come in and get a drop on bin Laden from behind."

But they didn't take that route, because Fury says they didn't get approval from a higher level. "Whether that was Central Command all the way up to the president of the United States, I'm not sure," he says.

The next option that Delta wanted to employ was to drop hundreds of landmines in the mountain passes that led to Pakistan, which was bin Laden’s escape route.

"First guy blows his leg off, everybody else stops. That allows aircraft overhead to find them. They see all these heat sources out there. Okay, there a big large group of Al Qaeda moving south. They can engage that," Fury explains.

But they didn't do that either, because Fury says that plan was also disapproved. He says he has "no idea" why.

"How often does Delta come up with a tactical plan that's disapproved by higher headquarters?" Pelley asks.

"In my experience, in my five years at Delta, never before," Fury says.


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20 Taliban killed in US missile attack in Pakistan.

Updated 5:44 a.m. CT, Sat., Oct. 4, 2008
DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan - Militants on Saturday buried the bodies of Arab comrades who were among at least 20 people killed when suspected U.S. missiles hit a house near the Afghan border, Pakistani officials said.

The United States has launched a flurry of strikes in recent weeks against suspected al-Qaida and Taliban targets in northwestern Pakistan, straining ties between the two anti-terror allies.

Pakistan has been unable or unwilling to eliminate militant sanctuaries blamed for rising violence on both sides of the border. The frontier region is believed to be a possible hiding place for al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri.

Al Qaeda Leader Abu Rami of Baghdad network killed.

An alleged, top al-Qaeda figure accused of masterminding one of the deadliest car bombings in Iraq and the videoed execution of a Russian diplomat, has been killed in a shoot out with coalition forces in Baghdad, the US military said today.

Mahir Ahmad Mahmud Judu al-Zubaydi, better known as Abu Rami, is said to have controlled the eastern half of Baghdad, an area called Rusafa.

Coalition troops surrounded a building in Adhamiya last night and demanded the occupants to surrender. They were shot at and returned fire. In the exchange, Abu Rami and a woman, who was with him, were killed.

A military statement did not specify whether the “coalition forces” involved were American or British. British special forces regularly take part in operations to kill or capture high-level al-Qaeda targets in the capital.

The death of Abu Rami will be a blow to the extremist, Sunni Arab group, said Rear Admiral Patrick Driscoll, a US military spokesman.

"His removal from the al-Qaeda in Iraq network will send shockwaves through Baghdad's terrorist bombing networks,” he said.

“Its ability to conduct grizzly attacks against Iraqi civilians and coalition and Iraqi forces has been severely crippled by this precision operation."

A bombing cell that was part of a network allegedly run by Abu Rami is thought to have been behind a coordinated car bomb and suicide bomb attack in Baghdad two days ago at the peak of the Muslim holiday of Eid ul-Fitr.

Scores of people were killed and injured in the blasts near two Shia mosques.

Abu Rami is also accused of masterminding one of the deadliest attacks against Shia Arabs in the war. More than 200 people died in the car bombing in the Baghdad Shia slum of Sadr City in November 2006.

In addition, the alleged militant is thought to have taken part in multiple kidnappings and videotaped executions, including the fatal shooting in June 2006 of one of four Russian diplomats.

The news of Abu Rami’s death came as Poland, one of the last countries with a sizeable contribution of troops in Iraq, ended its mission and said that it was pulling out its remaining 900 soldiers by the end of the month.

"We feel responsible for the future of Iraq,” Bogdan Klich, Poland’s Defence Minister, said during an end-of-mission ceremony on a military base in the Shia province of Diwaniyah, south of Baghdad.

“The completion of our mission does not mean end of an engagement. We hope to cooperate in Iraq's economic and financial areas," he said.

Twenty-one Polish soldiers have been killed and 70 others wounded over the past five and a half years.

Poland’s exit from Iraq will leave 24 countries with foreign troops on the ground.

Most only have a token presence, however. The US military is by far the largest contributor, comprising 149,000 of the 156,000 forces in theatre. Britain comes a distant second, with 4,100 forces – a figure that is set to drop further next year.

US to China: Put lead in our toys and we'll sale weapons to Taiwan!

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- In a move bound to anger China, the United States intends to sell $6.4 billion in arms to Taiwan, the State Department said Friday.

State Department deputy spokesman Robert Wood said Congress -- whose approval is needed for the deal to go through -- was notified Friday afternoon. He indicated the administration expects congressional approval quickly.

The package includes a variety of U.S.-made weapons systems, including Patriot III anti-missile missiles, Apache attack helicopters, Harpoon missiles and Javelin anti-tank missiles.

The deal had been in the works for a few months, Wood said, and the decision is "consistent with U.S. policy of providing arms for defense of Taiwan and consistent with the Taiwan Relations Act."

"This arms deal is a key factor in bringing security and stability across the Taiwan Strait," he added. The deal also gives Taiwan upgrades for Taiwan's E-2T aircraft and spare parts for its air force.

U.S. arms sales to Taiwan have always angered China. The latest deal comes at a time when the United States needs China in negotiations over Iran's and North Korea's nuclear programs. But Wood said the U.S. government decision is no surprise to Beijing, as the Chinese were briefed "several" times about the impending deal.

This is the latest chapter in a decades-long uneasy standoff. China claims Taiwan is its own territory and has threatened to invade if Taiwan ever declares independence. The United States has said it will defend Taiwan if China ever attacks.