Article...Taliban foreign minister defects from Kabul regime
BY JUAN O. TAMAYO
Knight Ridder Newspapers
bayarea.com
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The Taliban foreign minister, Maulvi Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, has defected from the Kabul regime, Knight Ridder has learned, the first sign of a significant break in the ranks of the Taliban leadership.
In a Pakistani intelligence operation, the foreign minister was spirited out of Afghanistan in a small aircraft. He later traveled to the Persian Gulf nation of Dubai, preparing to join Afghanistan's deposed king in Rome.
Muttawakil's defection was confirmed by intelligence officials in Islamabad and Washington, and also by aides to the former Afghan king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, in Rome. U.S. intelligence officials in Washington also insisted that Muttawakil had defected, saying they had received reports that Pakistani intelligence was behind the defection.
Pakistani Foreign Office spokesman Riaz Mohammed Khan and the chief Taliban diplomat at the Afghan Embassy in Islamabad, Abdulrahim, denied that Muttawakil had switched sides.
"There is no such development. I think it's speculation, pure and simple speculation," said Khan. Added Abdulrahim, chief of mission in the temporary absence of the ambassador, "It's pure rumors, nothing else." Like many Afghans, Abdulrahim uses only one name.
Although Muttawakil isn't considered a major player within the Taliban, his defection would be a victory for secret U.S. and Pakistani efforts to weaken and perhaps even topple Afghanistan's rulers without U.S. ground forces having to set foot in the Texas-sized nation of 25 million people.
Muttawakil recently urged supreme Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar several times to surrender suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden and spare his already war-ravaged nation further damage from the U.S. air strikes.
A Pakistan security official said Muttawakil fled Afghanistan a few days ago aboard a small airplane and flew to Islamabad in a secret operation arranged by Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence.
Muttawakil was debriefed by ISI officials in the Islamabad twin city of Rawalpindi and was later allowed to fly on to Dubai, home of hundreds of Afghan exiles opposed to the Taliban, the Pakistani officials said.
Aides to Zair Shah said Muttawakil had been in touch with them and was expected to travel to Rome soon to meet with the monarch, they added.
"This is obviously a big blow to the Taliban, the first significant break in their ranks and one that everyone hopes will be followed by many more defections so that the Taliban will self-destroy and the Americans can stop the bombing," said the Pakistani security official, who asked not to be identified by name.
Peter Tomsen, an Afghan expert now advising the Bush administration, said that Muttawakil represented a group within the Taliban "who resent the heavy influence of Osama bin Laden on Omar."
"There will be more defections from the Taliban," predicted Tomsen, who served as then-President Reagan's special envoy to the Afghan mujahedeen that fought the Soviets in the 1980s.
Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid had described Muttawakil as Omar's "trusted confidant and official spokesman," who studied under the Taliban leader, and "started out as his companion, driver, food-taster, translator and note-taker."
"He quickly progressed to higher things such as communicating with foreign diplomats and aid agency officials, traveling to meet Taliban commanders and meeting with Pakistani officials," Rashid wrote in a landmark book on the Taliban published last year. "Wakil acts as Omar's eyes and ears and is also his doorkeeper. No important Afghan can reach Omar without first going through Wakil."
Still, Muttawakil was not part of the small circle of clerics who helped found the Taliban and who remain Omar's closest advisers.
Afghans have a reputation as fierce fighters and, sometimes, for switching sides when the odds favor their enemies. In the civil war that following the expulsion of the Soviets in 1989, the seven main Afghan factions made and broke dozens of alliances.
Islamabad has been rife with murmurings that ISI and U.S. intelligence agents had been reaching out to moderate Taliban leaders and their non-Taliban supporters in hopes of provoking enough desertions to collapse the Afghan government from within.
Abdul Haq, a veteran of the mujahedeen is known to have been working hand in hand with the ISI in past weeks to persuade old comrades now fighting for the Taliban to break ranks and join the opposition.
Aware of the need to protect their rear guard, Taliban leaders have offered to share power with several Afghan tribal and regional leaders.
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(Knight Ridder Newspapers correspondents Warren P. Strobel in Washington and Michael Zielenziger in New Delhi contributed to this report)
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