Afghan Suicide Bombings, Tied to Taliban, Point to Pakistan - New York Times

Afghan Suicide Bombings, Tied to Taliban, Point to Pakistan - New York Times:

"KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Feb. 12 — Arrests and interrogations of suspects in a recent series of suicide bombings in Afghanistan show that the attacks have been orchestrated from Pakistan by members of the ousted Taliban government with little interference by the Pakistani authorities, Afghan officials say.
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In taped interviews by an Afghan interrogator, two Afghans and three Pakistanis who were among 21 people arrested in recent weeks described their roles in the attacks, which have killed at least 70 people in the last three months, most of them Afghan civilians but also international peacekeepers, a Canadian diplomat and a dozen Afghan police officers and soldiers.

In the tape, the men described a fairly low-budget network that begins with the recruitment of young bombers in the sprawling Pakistani port city of Karachi. The bombers are moved to safe houses in the border towns of Quetta and Chaman, and then transferred into Afghanistan, where they are provided with cars and explosives and sent out to find a target.

The tape appears to confirm Afghan officials' suspicions that the suicide bombings, which are largely a recent phenomenon in Afghanistan, were generated outside Afghanistan, and in particular from neighboring Pakistan. It was shown to The New York Times by an Afghan official who asked not to be identified because of the diplomatic implications of the contents.

A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, dismissed the claims of the Afghan government. 'This is a propaganda campaign of the government,' he said by satellite telephone from an unknown location. 'Our mujahedeen don't send one group to one area so they can be found and arrested. Our mujahedeen send different people to different areas at different times."

He added that there was no need to recruit Pakistanis for the attacks. "They are all Afghans," he said of the suicide bombers.

But Afghan officials said the confessions provided the proof they needed to demand action from Pakistan. "I think there is a factory for these bombers," said Asadullah Khaled, the governor of Kandahar Province, where 15 attacks have occurred in the last three months.

President Hamid Karzai is traveling to Pakistan on Wednesday specifically to raise the issue with President Pervez Musharraf and in speeches to Parliament and officers at a military academy as well.
"If you are the ones blowing yourselves up, why are you making the explosion in front of the police headquarters, where people like you are standing in front getting passports?" Mr. Karzai said, addressing the bombers rhetorically, in a televised speech to elders from southern Afghanistan last week.

He has spoken increasingly of the need to tackle the problem at the source. Anti-Pakistan sentiment has been rising in Afghanistan, and a popular refrain is that if the hand of Pakistan were cut, the Taliban, many of whom fled over the border when they were ousted in late 2001, would be no more.
"Most of the attackers are non-Afghans," the governor of Kandahar, Mr. Khaled, said Saturday at a memorial service for 14 victims of the latest bombing. "We have proof, we have prisoners," he added. "We have addresses, we have cassettes."

Pakistani officials in the past have said the Pakistanis arrested in Afghanistan are usually illiterate laborers looking for work.

Judging by the tape, Pakistan appeared to be the base for the terror network, however. In the interviews, all of the men appeared to speak freely, some expressing regret for what they had done. Only one showed some nervousness, though the interrogations seemed relatively relaxed.

Three of the men, speaking in Urdu, said they were Pakistanis and had been recruited as bombers.
Two of the men, Akhtar Ali and Sajjad, who only gave one name, said they had been recruited by a man named Jamal, who was working for the Taliban and who owns a bookstore in Karachi. Sajjad had been staying with his brother in Karachi when Jamal showed him video cassettes in which Muslim clerics urged listeners to go and fight a holy war and earn a sure way to paradise.

"I was doing nothing, walking around, playing cricket and football," Sajjad said, adding in reference to a senior cleric: "The maulavi sahib talked to me and showed me a cassette, so I got involved. They were talking on the cassettes and telling us to do this and that, telling me to kill Americans."

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