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Taliban again rejects Pakistan diplomatic attempt


By John Daniszewski and Norman Kempster / Los Angeles Times

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   ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- A delegation of Pakistani clerics and the head of the country's spy agency returned from Afghanistan empty-handed Friday after failing to persuade Taliban leaders to turn over terrorism suspect Osama bin Laden for trial in the West.
   The delegation also did not gain freedom for eight foreign relief workers, including two Americans, held in Afghanistan on charges of illegally preaching Christianity, an Afghan government source said.
   In Washington, President Bush reiterated his demand that the Taliban hand over bin Laden to a country that would put him on trial. "There is no negotiations with the Taliban," Bush told reporters Friday before going into a meeting with King Abdullah II of Jordan.
   "We're in hot pursuit," Bush said of the U.S. effort to kill or capture bin Laden, whom the American president has labeled the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The Saudi militant already faces a U.S. indictment in the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
   The Jordanian king, who originally had been scheduled to visit Washington on Sept. 11, told Bush that bin Laden's activities are "completely against all the principles that Arab and Muslims believe in."
   "The majority of Arabs and Muslims will band together with our colleagues all over the world to be able to put an end to this horrible scourge of international terrorism, and you'll see a united front," Abdullah said.
   In other developments:
   -- Emergency relief supplies aimed at heading off a humanitarian disaster in and around Afghanistan are expected to arrive Saturday in the region, U.N. officials reported in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.
   The aid efforts, expected to cost $584 million, appear focused on two fronts -- preparing for up to 1.5 million new refugees expected along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border if war breaks out and working to deliver food to the millions of internally displaced Afghans who may have to rely on relief to survive the winter.
   -- For the third Friday in a row, pro-Taliban clerics in mosques across Pakistan orated against any U.S. attack on Afghanistan. At Islamabad's Red Mosque, about 3,000 people heard the leader of the Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan party, Azam Tariq, warn of suicide bombings here if Pakistan helps the United States go after bin Laden.
   "If Americans attacks Afghanistan we will make a pile of corpses of the Americans by tying bombs to our bodies," he warned.
   -- The Bush administration claimed to be making headway in its effort to dry up the sources of revenue used by bin Laden's Al Qaeda network and other terrorist groups. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said about 20 governments "have taken concrete action either to freeze assets or impose new regulations."
   The one-day mission to the Taliban was the second failed bid by Pakistan in less than two weeks to warn Afghanistan's ruling faction that it will face severe consequences unless bin Laden and his associates are surrendered.
   Pakistan still held out the possibility that it would sponsor another attempt in the coming days to reason with the Taliban, but Foreign Ministry spokesman Riaz Mohammed Khan insisted Friday that the Pakistani government is not planning to embark on negotiations. He seemed to imply, however, that religious leaders have leeway to explore various ideas to solve the crisis and that the government would facilitate them.
   "We have not defined a mandate, they carry their own message," Khan said of the clerics. "This effort is on behalf of an important segment of the people of Pakistan."
   Pakistan is under pressure from the United States to adhere to the Bush administration's declaration that the surrender of bin Laden is a nonnegotiable demand. Khan said that Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, who also led the last mission to talk to the Taliban on Sept. 17, has not changed the government's message since then.
   "In view of the gravity of the situation, the Afghan leadership should be responsive to what the world is expecting of them," Khan reiterated.
   According to the account of the meeting in Kandahar from the Afghan government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar met with Ahmed, director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency. At about the same time, the Muslim clerics who had traveled with Ahmed held meeting with their clerical counterparts in Afghanistan.
   This source said the delegation raised the issue of bin Laden's future and, at the request of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, the question of the arrested foreign aid workers, whose trial is due to resume Saturday in Kabul, the Afghan capital.
   "There was not any positive response by the Taliban," the source said.
   As diplomatic efforts continued, aid workers were anticipating the arrival Saturday of international shipments in Pakistani cities near the Afghan frontier. A Russian heavy air transport plane carrying more than 40 tons of plastic tarp from Copenhagen was expected to land in Quetta, less than 50 miles from Afghanistan's southeastern border. The tarps will be used to make shelters.
   Efforts also were under way to distribute World Food Program grain already on hand.
   But a more ambitious undertaking involved a truck convoy put together by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). The convoy is scheduled to leave Peshawar Saturday morning with 220 tons of aid on an arduous five-day journey over the 13,000-foot Shah Shaleem Pass to the city of Feyzabad in northern Afghanistan.
   The severity of the trip is a reminder of just how remote much of Afghanistan remains and the difficulty of getting assistance to those trapped inside the country.
   Once inside Afghanistan, the aid will be loaded back onto light trucks for the trip into Feyzabad. The city and the area around it are controlled by resistance groups who have been fighting the ruling Taliban for years. Fisher denied that the aid was going to the groups, called the Northern Alliance, because they are now backed by the United States.
   "We've done this three times before," he said, noting that with snow already falling in the area of the pass, it would likely be the only such shipment before winter sets in.