The US, Russia, Iran and Pakistan undertook an extraordinary joint attempt to force the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden following a top-level meeting of officials of the four countries in Berlin in mid-July, The Guardian reported yesterday.
The meeting under UN auspices resulted in having Pakistan pass a threat of US military strikes to the Taliban, the British newspaper said.
The Guardian cited a range of "senior diplomatic sources" and quoted Niaz Naik, a former foreign minister of Pakistan, who was at the meeting. It added that US intelligence knew precisely where bin Laden was.
"The Taliban refused to comply but the serious nature of what they were told raises the possibility that bin Laden, far from launching the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon out of the blue 10 days ago, was launching a pre-emptive strike in response to what he saw as US threats," it said. The attacks left nearly 7,000 people dead or missing.
The four-day meeting in Berlin was the third in a series dubbed "brainstorming on Afghanistan," part of a classic diplomatic device known as "track two," The Guardian said. The participants were experts with long diplomatic experience of the region who were no longer government officials but had close links with their governments, it said.
"The Americans indicated to us that in case the Taliban does not behave and in case Pakistan also doesn't help us to influence the Taliban, then the United States would be left with no option but to take an overt action against Afghanistan," Naik told the paper.
According to Naik, the US officials raised the issue of an attack on Afghanistan at one of the full sessions of the conference, convened by Francesc Vendrell, the UN secretary-general's special representative on Afghanistan.
The UN had invited official representatives of both the Taliban and the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. Abdullah Abdullah, the Northern Alliance's foreign minister, had attended, but the Taliban had declined to send a representative, The Guardian said.
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