The bloodstained theatrics of Afghanistan’s power game continued to play out on Friday as Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government buried its main peace envoy while Pakistan’s army chief hit back at US accusations that his country is secretly supporting the Taliban.
In Kabul, shots rang out over the coffin of former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was assassinated by a suicide bomber on Tuesday, during an emotional and sometimes rowdy funeral.
Angry mourners shouted “death to Karzai” and “death to the ISI” (Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence) highlighting the growing isolation of the president who appointed Rabbani and public anger towards the Pakistani spy agency many Afghans blame for his death.
Former spy chief and rising political star Amrullah Saleh made a fiery speech to supporters outside the graveyard.
“The government doesn’t have the right to talk with enemies any more. Nothing will come of so much talking,” he said. “Just wait for a call. Very soon we will come to the streets.”
Hours later, Pakistani Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Kayani denied allegations he was waging a “proxy war” in Afghanistan through the Haqqani network, a ruthless militant group which the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, described as a “veritable arm” of the ISI.
“Admiral Mullen knows fully well which countries are in contact with the Haqqanis. Singling out Pakistan is neither fair nor productive,” Kayani said in a terse statement issued 24 hours after Mullen’s stinging comments to the US Congress.
Senior US officials have issued a series of verbal assaults on the Pakistani military since Haqqani militants carried out an audacious attack on the US embassy in Kabul on Sept. 13.
Citing phone intercepts, US officials said they had linked fighters at the scene of the 20-hour battle to ISI officials in Pakistan, a senior Pakistani official said.
The US also accuses the ISI of orchestrating a truck bomb attack on a US base near Kabul on Sept. 10 that wounded 77 US soldiers — one of the highest casualty tolls against western forces in the 10 year conflict.
US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and CIA chief David Petraeus have all called on Pakistan to cut its links to the Haqqanis. Pakistan denies the links exist, but it was Mullen’s harsh comments on Thursday that sent ripples through political circles in Islamabad, where some worry the frayed relationship is edging towards violent confrontation.
Some US officials have advocated sending special forces teams into the Haqqani safe haven of Waziristan — a move that could trigger a wider armed conflict between the two countries.
Pakistani Minister of Foreign Affairs Hina Rabbani Khar warned that the US could lose Pakistan as an ally. The administration US President Barack Obama would alienate Pakistan “at their own cost,” she warned in unusually strong language.
Western intelligence agencies are investigating whether Rabbani was assassinated by al-Qaeda to show its continuing power 10 years after the similar assassination of then-Northern Alliance head Ahmad Shah Massoud.
Western analysts are also trying to decipher the Taliban’s confused response to the killing, in which one “spokesman” claimed responsibility but others denied it.
The turmoil has left Karzai increasingly isolated. Few members of his government attended Rabbani’s burial, while the president himself stayed away, having presided over a low-key state funeral at his heavily guarded palace earlier.
Karzai’s powerful half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai and a close adviser have been killed in recent months. The death of Rabbani, one of the most important former jihad leaders who fought both the Soviets and the Taliban, has damaged prospects for substantive peace talks and re-opened dangerous divisions in Afghan society not seen since the vicious civil war of the 1990s.
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