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The Taliban will ‘never be defeated’

* Mullah Omar’s trainer says the US must negotiate with its enemies
* Says Washington must spend billions of dollars on reconstruction to save face
* Insists Omer not in Pakistan, but in Uruzgan province

Daily Times Monitor

LAHORE: The Pakistani intelligence agent who trained Taliban leader Mullah Omar to fight has warned that NATO forces will never overpower their enemies in Afghanistan and should talk to them rather than sacrifice more lives, said a Sunday Times report on Sunday.

“You can never win the war in Afghanistan,” said so-called ‘Colonel Imam’, who ran a training programme for the Afghan resistance to the Soviet Union’s occupation from 1979 to 1989, then helped to form the Taliban.

“I have worked with these people since the 1970s and I tell you they will never be defeated. Anyone who has come here has got stuck. The more you kill, the more they will expand,” the report quotes Imam as saying.

Today western intelligence agencies believe Imam, whose real name is Amir Sultan Tarar, and was trained at Fort Bragg – the US army base where America’s special forces are stationed – is among a group of renegade officers from the Inter-Services Intelligence agency who continue to help the Taliban.

United Nations officials and Afghanistan’s intelligence service have reported sightings of him in the Afghan provinces of Helmand and Uruzgan. It is a charge he shrugs off, claiming that at 65 he has not worked for almost eight years. “My students are far ahead of me now. They are giving a lesson to the world. I am very proud of them,” he said.

According to Imam, Helmand is particularly difficult because of the character of the people. “They couldn’t care less about loss of property or loss of life,” he said.

It is unlikely, claims the report, that anybody alive today knows the Afghans as well as Imam. All the key figures were trained in his camps, from the late Ahmad Shah Massoud to warlords such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, his ‘naughtiest’ student.

Imam was Pakistan’s consul-general in Herat when the Taliban captured the city in 1995 from Ismail Khan, the mujahedin commander, who claims the ISI agent oversaw the whole Taliban operation. From there he guided the Taliban as they took over the cities of Mazar-e-Sharif and Jalalabad and eventually captured Kabul.

When General Pervez Musharraf, then president of Pakistan, agreed to US pressure to cut ties to the Taliban, the colonel was outraged.

Recalled to Islamabad, he told Musharraf that he couldn’t “defeat these people, they are well trained, they have a lot of ammunition and the more you kill, the more supporters will come”.

He has offered to find the Americans a way out, “We can give them a face-saving solution but they must change their strategy”.

First, he says, they must spend billions on reconstruction. Then they must open talks with Omar rather than the so-called moderate Taliban with whom negotiations are under way.

“When are you people going to understand there are no number two Taliban?” he asked. “Those who break away from mainstream Taliban have no place in society. You may make deals in Dubai or Saudi Arabia, but when they come back to Afghanistan and people know they have compromised with the Americans, they are finished.

Omer’s whereabouts: He insisted the Taliban leader was not in Pakistan. “He’s in the hills of Uruzgan, his home province. If there’s a requirement he will listen to me, but why should I get him involved in a risky situation?” he asks.

Imam said he had watched with horror as fighting spread into Pakistan and had been shocked to see his fellow officers having to fight against their own countrymen in Swat.

Imam has one last warning, “I tell you when my nation rises up, it is not Afghanistan, not Iraq. There will be tremendous killing”.

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