A senior Taliban minister has offered a last-minute deal to hand over Osama bin Laden during a secret visit to Islamabad, senior sources in Pakistan said Tuesday night.
For the first time, the Taliban offered to hand over bin Laden for trial in a country other than the US without asking to see evidence first in return for a halt to the bombing, a source close to Pakistan's military leadership said.
But US officials appear to have dismissed the proposal and are instead hoping to engineer a split within the Taliban leadership.
The offer was brought by Mullah Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, the Taliban foreign minister and a man who is often regarded as a more moderate figure in the regime.
He met officials from the CIA and Pakistan's ISI intelligence directorate in Islamabad on Monday. US officials pressed the minister for a sweeping change in the regime. "They are trying to persuade him to get the moderate elements together," another source said.
Muttawakil's visit coincided with the arrival in Islamabad of Colin Powell, the US secretary of state. After several hours of talks with Pakistan's military ruler General Pervez Musharraf on Tuesday, Powell admitted that moderate Taliban officials would play a role in talks on a future Afghan government. "We would have to listen to them or at least take them into account," he said.
Powell also met envoys sent by Zahir Shah, the former Afghan king who lives in exile in Rome, and a representative of the opposition Northern Alliance, sources said.
The Taliban foreign minister had asked for face-to-face talks with the US secretary of state but no direct meeting was held. Muttawakil returned to Kabul Tuesday night and the Taliban have publicly denied he was ever in Islamabad.
His visit came as Taliban forces in Afghanistan came under renewed pressure from the bombing campaign and opposition advances.
Some reports suggested the Taliban foreign minister had in fact defected in the face of mounting pressure and was now in the Gulf.
But sources in Pakistan confirmed he had returned to Kabul and said there was still no clear rift in the ultra-Islamic regime.
Instead, the offer appears to indicate that Pakistan is applying pressure on moderate Taliban elements to negotiate their way out of the crisis.
Pakistan has made clear that it wants the bombing campaign to be brief and that it does not want the Northern Alliance to sweep to power in Kabul. Musharraf said publicly on Tuesday that he wanted to see "moderate Taliban" in the next Afghan government.
Pakistan is now the only country to maintain diplomatic links with the ostracized regime.
The Taliban has offered to hand over bin Laden before but only if sufficient evidence was presented. Bin Laden is wanted both for the Sept. 11 attacks and for masterminding the bombings of two US embassies in East Africa in 1998 in which 224 people were killed. He is also suspected of involvement in other terrorist attacks, including the suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen last year.
But until now the Taliban regime has consistently said it has not seen any convincing evidence to implicate the Saudi dissident in any crime.
"Now they have agreed to hand him over to a third country without the evidence being presented in advance," the source close to the military said.
However, it is unclear whether the Taliban would have the ability to seize bin Laden and hand him over.
The US administration has not publicly supported the idea of a trial for bin Laden outside America and appears intent on removing from power the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and the hardliners in the regime.
It is not clear how the Taliban foreign minister traveled from Kabul to Pakistan without approval from the US. One report in the US yesterday suggested that Pakistani intelligence flew him out of the country in a small aircraft.
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