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Pakistan closes last Taliban embassy
11/22/01By LAURA KING
AP Special Correspondent
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — When the black-turbaned fighters of the Taliban took over Afghanistan and imposed their unforgiving vision of Islam on its people, Pakistan was the first country to grant diplomatic recognition to the ragtag militia it had nurtured into a potent force.
On Thursday, that relationship came full circle when Pakistan shut down the Taliban embassy in Islamabad, leaving Afghanistan's one-time rulers — now fighting to hang on to pockets of territory — without diplomatic ties to any nation.
Ever mistrustful of outside influence, and increasingly shunned abroad as their rule grew harsher, the Taliban had forged few links with the rest of the world in the five years since they rose to power.
Aside from Pakistan, they had formal relations only with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and both cut those ties soon after the United States blamed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on a man the Taliban called their guest in Afghanistan, Saudi exile Osama bin Laden.
Not Pakistan, though. Even when President Pervez Musharraf's government allied itself with the United States in the confrontation over bin Laden, it maintained relations with the Taliban, saying it was crucial to keep the lines of communication open.
The end came with little fanfare. Foreign Ministry spokesman Aziz Ahmed Khan told reporters Thursday the decision to shut down the embassy had been made a day earlier and ``communicated officially to the Afghans this morning.''
For the United States, it didn't come a moment too soon.
``We are delighted to know that Pakistan is severing diplomatic relations with the Taliban,'' a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition, Kenton Keith, said in Islamabad.
Even before the announcement, Afghan staffers began packing to go. The deputy ambassador, Sohail Shaheen, and other staff came in for work early in the morning, but left soon afterward.
``We have stopped issuing visas and ended all our operations,'' said embassy official Mufti Yousuf.
The main gate of the embassy — a low-slung building tucked away on a quiet, shrubbery-shaded street — was shut, but the Taliban's white flag, inscribed with a Quranic verse, still fluttered from the flagpole. After dark, two Taliban officials came and took it down.
In the early weeks of the American-led campaign in Afghanistan, the embassy was the scene of near-daily news conferences conducted in its front yard by the Taliban ambassador, Abdul Salam Zaeef.
His bespectacled visage became a fixture on TV screens around the world — and his claims of skyrocketing civilian casualties caused consternation in the U.S.-led coalition.
Because of the time difference between Pakistan and the United States, Pentagon rebuttals of whatever Zaeef had to say — inevitably carried on live television — usually came only hours later.
The news conferences stopped two weeks ago, after Pakistan asked the Taliban to stop using the embassy to spread propaganda.
Earlier this week, Pakistan ordered the closure of Taliban consulates in Peshawar and Quetta. It shut the consulate in Karachi this month because of its alleged involvement in sometimes violent anti-U.S. and anti-government demonstrations.
The severing of ties marked the Taliban's final abandonment by what had once been a powerful patron. Pakistan was instrumental in the rise of the Taliban in the early 1990s, helping fund and organize the militia.
The groundwork for links between the Taliban and bin Laden's al-Qaida network was laid even earlier.
When Afghan insurgents fought the Soviet army in the 1980s, Pakistan's secret service, the ISI, set up training camps for the rebels inside Afghanistan, some of which were later taken over by al-Qaida.
The ISI also recruited thousands of the Arab fighters who battled the Soviets alongside the Afghans. Some of those foreign warriors are believed to form the hard core of bin Laden's network.