The fundamentalist Islamic regime of Afghanistan's Taliban unravelled yesterday, as diplomats scrambled to establish a new government and restore stability to a weary nation wounded by two decades of civil war.
The Taliban's civil war foe, the Northern Alliance, has refrained so far from the orgy of reprisal killings and bloody power struggles among its disparate factions that accompanied its last takeover in the early 1990s.
But with diplomats galloping to keep up with field commanders, alliance leaders came under growing international pressure to strike an early deal on a broadbased government, including the Pashtun tribe from which the Taliban draws support.
PHOTO: REUTERS
On day 39 of the US bombing campaign to punish the Taliban for sheltering Osama bin Laden, blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks in the US, the Saudi-born militant remained free in Afghanistan's harsh terrain while US special forces headed south to hunt him down.
He and his chief protector, Taliban supreme leader Mullah Omar, could be heading with their supporters to Afghanistan's arid mountains to fight a guerrilla war, with the Taliban already in retreat from most cities, defense analysts said.
The Taliban have lost control of their southern stronghold of Kandahar and the city is in "total chaos," Northern Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah told Iran's state television yesterday.
"There is complete chaos in Kandahar. It's absolute confusion. The Taliban have lost control of the situation and no Taliban officials are to be found," Abdullah said, without saying what presence, if any, his fighters had in the old royal capital.
There was no independent confirmation of who controlled what in the Taliban heartland in the south.
As Taliban rule crumbled, Mullah Omar urged his scattered fighters to stand and fight.
"Any person who goes hither and thither is like a slaughtered chicken which falls and dies. You should regroup yourselves, resist and fight," the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press quoted him as saying on Tuesday.
An anti-Taliban group seized control yesterday of the eastern city of Jalalabad, whose outskirts housed training camps for bin Laden's al-Qaeda and Pakistanis fighting Indian rule in Kashmir, Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press said.
Four northeastern provinces also slipped from Taliban hands after local uprisings, officials and tribal leaders said.
"Now the Taliban have less than 20 percent of the territory of Afghanistan," opposition Northern Alliance Interior Minister Yunis Qanuni said.
World leaders were trying to cobble together a multinational peacekeeping force for Afghanistan and plans for a transitional government for a country racked by civil war since the former Soviet Union invaded on Christmas Day, 1979, to back communist rule in the Muslim country.Diplomats were converging on Pakistan to hammer out a post-Taliban administration in neighboring Afghanistan.
UN envoy to Afghanistan Fransesc Vendrell was in Islamabad, waiting to go to Kabul to meet Northern Alliance leaders as soon as UN security officials give him clearance that it is safe.
He is expected to push a UN plan envisaging a two-year interim government bringing all ethnic groups under one umbrella with a multinational security force to protect them.
The UN Security Council is considering a British and French drafted resolution on Wednesday that would support a political blueprint drafted by Lakhdar Brahimi, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special envoy for Afghanistan.
Brahimi has suggested a "coalition of the willing" contribute multinational troops, which diplomats said could include Turkey, Jordan and Malaysia, along with European nations.
Brahimi said he was organizing a conference as soon as possible of all Afghan factions and called on the international community to get food and other supplies to ordinary Afghans, millions of whom risk starvation as the winter snows set in.
The meeting is expected to take place in the United Arab Emirates within the next week but no date has been set, US officials said. Other diplomats, however, said the conference may be held in Geneva instead because of objections from Iran, which has a long-standing dispute with the UAE over sovereignty of three Gulf islands Tehran controls.
Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister, proposed establishing an all-Afghan provisional council. The provisional council would eventually set up a transitional administration, to last up to two years, and draft a constitution for a new government.
At the same time, he said, a Loya Jirga, or assembly of tribal elders, should be convened to approve the transitional administration and authorize it to draft a constitution. Afghans have been trying for more than a decade to organize a Loya Jirga without success.
The UN dispatched the first shipment of aid yesterday to northern Afghanistan from ex-Soviet Uzbekistan, officials said.
Aid agencies warn of a humanitarian disaster in the making with harsh winter looming and 3.4 million people, half the population of northern Afghanistan, depending on aid to survive.
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