Afghan official's angry criticism hushed by 'third-country rule'

11/08/2001

By LEE HANCOCK / The Dallas Morning News

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – The yard on a dusty residential side street has become a major point of attack in the Taliban's monthlong war with the United States. But the yard, a front line in the fight for world opinion, fell silent Wednesday after a pointed warning from the Pakistani government.

Pakistani officials confirmed that the Taliban's ambassador, Abdul Salam Zaeef, was summoned to the foreign ministry Tuesday afternoon. He received a formal admonition that his late-afternoon news conferences in the front yard of the Afghan Embassy compound violated rules of diplomacy.

"The Afghan ambassador was called yesterday and reminded of the third-country rule, whereby a diplomatic mission cannot use its embassy for the purposes of criticizing a third country," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Aziz Ahmad Khan.

The embassy canceled a planned afternoon news conference Wednesday and declined to comment on the matter.

A U.S. Embassy spokesman waved off questions Wednesday about whether Pakistan's warning about the Taliban delegation's near-daily anti-American diatribes had come at Washington's behest.

Pakistani officials declined to elaborate on what prompted the move.

They also declined to respond to Pakistani newspaper reports Wednesday that the country's cable television operators had been asked to stop providing customers with programming from the Al-Jazeera satellite network. The Qatar-based broadcaster has been granted wide access to Afghanistan and Taliban officials and has drawn the ire of U.S. officials for airing repeated communiqués from Osama bin Laden, the chief suspect in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

Calls to rise up

President Bush launched an air war against Afghanistan's ruling Taliban on Oct. 7 when its leaders refused to surrender Mr. bin Laden and help dismantle his al-Qaeda terrorist network.

Ambassador Zaeef's litanies of civilian casualties, American sins, and Taliban victories have routinely made front-page news in Pakistan. Even the most incendiary Afghan statements usually have appeared without any immediate American response.

"The Taliban have been out there almost every day with these claims. They offer little or no evidence, but the Americans have been very slow to respond," said Rifaat Hussain, a specialist in defense and strategic studies at Quaid-i Azam University in Islamabad. "While American failures glare at us every night, some of the successes that they're achieving are shrouded in mystery. ...The Americans have played into the hands of the Taliban, allowing them to win the propaganda war."

An American diplomat acknowledged Wednesday that the embassy has had to wait for direction from Washington, and the 10-hour time difference has meant that an entire day's news cycle often has passed before official comment or response can be offered.

Pentagon officials have voiced increasing exasperation at the daily Taliban verbal barrage.

Tuesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ridiculed questions about news reports that Taliban fighters might have downed an American helicopter and killed four crew members three days before.

"Is this another Taliban report? They're very busy, those folks. They must have a hotline to the media all over the world," he said. "One ought to have a good deal of pause about those claims after all the evidence."

Trying to regain ground in the fierce fight for world public opinion, the White House last week announced plans to beef up the U.S. public relations effort in Islamabad with a new coalition information center. A second center is being opened in London, and White House officials have said the operation will be coordinated in Washington by longtime Bush aide Karen Hughes.

Preparations are still under way, but the center in Islamabad should be up and running within days, an embassy spokesman said.

'Taliban lies'

In Afghanistan on Wednesday, opposition forces told reporters that they seized a district near Mazar-e Sharif and were closing in on the Taliban-controlled city. A Northern Alliance spokesman told The Associated Press that opposition forces had taken the Shol Ghar district, about 30 miles from Mazar-e Sharif, and that some of their units were within eight miles of the city.

The Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press reported Wednesday that a Taliban spokesman dismissed the opposition's claim of victory at Shol Ghar. But the spokesman acknowledged that Northern Alliance fighters had seized a nearby district south of the key Taliban stronghold.

U.S. warplanes have pounded Taliban lines near Mazar-e Sharif to encourage opposition forces to take the city in a major offensive before winter sets in. The Northern Alliance lost the city to the Taliban in 1998, and its recapture would open crucial supply lines from Tajikistan while cutting off major Taliban supply routes to the western part of the country.

U.S. warplanes also bombed behind Taliban positions on the Kabul front Wednesday.

The Taliban's Bakhtar News Agency said the American raids north of Kabul, in the eastern city of Jalalabad and the western city of Herat on Tuesday and Wednesday, killed at least 23 people and injured several dozen others.

The report could not be independently confirmed. U.S. military officials have long insisted that Taliban officials have grossly exaggerated the number of civilian casualties.

U.S. officials again reacted cautiously on Wednesday to opposition contentions that the Taliban was being pushed back.

"Information is hard to come by. It's very fluid. There's an ebb and flow to these situations," Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke told reporters in Washington.