Rivalry in Afghan provinces threatens more bloodshed

By Sayed Salahuddin

Monday February 11, 8:03 AM

KABUL/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Afghanistan's fragile interim government faced new challenges on Sunday as factional rivalry in two provinces threatened further bloodshed, while a top U.S. senator said intelligence suggests that Osama bin Laden, the world's most wanted man, remains alive.

"We don't know where bin Laden is. The best intelligence is he is still alive but where he is continues to be a question mark," Senator Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat, said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Graham chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, which receives regular briefings on intelligence from President George W. Bush's war on terrorism.

Speculation had mounted that bin Laden, who U.S. officials blame for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, might have been killed by a missile launched from an unmanned CIA aircraft. The missile hit what was believed to be a group of senior members of bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

But Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, the intelligence committee's top Republican, said he too believed bin Laden was still alive.

"I believe he's alive. ... We don't know where he is," Shelby said on NBC.

"He's a survivor by nature, has been, and I'll believe he's alive until we have some kind forensic evidence to the contrary. I have a feeling he'll reappear," the senator added.

Meanwhile, the deposed governor of the eastern province of Paktia said on Sunday he would recapture the region by force from a rival tribal faction that took control of the provincial capital Gardez last week.

And in the eastern province of Khost, a powerful commander asked the interim government of Hamid Karzai to name another governor after first consulting with the local shura (council) of elders and warned that if this was not done violence would erupt as it had in Paktia last week, where more than 50 people died in fighting.

UNACCEPTABLE

"The present governor is unacceptable to us because he was sent (by Kabul) without consulting the Khost shura," the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) quoted local commander Sardar Khan Khapaski as saying.

The deposed Paktia governor, Padshah Khan Zadran, warned of fresh violence in the troubled province. "Fighting will erupt if they (rival forces) do not evacuate from the area. ... We are ready to take it any time," he told Reuters.

Karzai held talks with Zadran and rival faction leader Haji Saifullah in Kabul on Saturday in a bid to settle the dispute.

In Mazar-i-Sharif, leaders from northern Afghanistan's three main ethnic groups reaffirmed their commitment to a U.N.- backed security plan on Sunday and gave armed men another three days to leave the area's main city.

A spokesman for warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum told reporters the three leaders had also agreed to extend the plan to other parts of northern Afghanistan after rival commanders clashed.

But one of the leaders said the talks had been tense after Dostum was forced to accept a minority role in a new police force for his traditional stronghold of Mazar-i-Sharif.

Bloody clashes last week between troops loyal to Dostum, who heads the mainly ethnic Uzbek Junbish-i-Milli party, and those under Mohammed Atta, northern leader of the ethnic Tajik Jamiat-i-Islami, have raised fears that Afghanistan's tenuous unity might be unravelling after the defeat of the Taliban government, which harboured bin Laden and his forces.

Meanwhile, Afghan Interior Minister Yunus Qanuni said on Sunday that authorities had found evidence linking two detained suspects to the shooting deaths of four foreign journalists, including two from Reuters, on a lonely stretch of road last year.

Qanuni declined to give details of the evidence, but said investigators were trying to determine if more people were involved.

DEFENSE MINISTER IN MOSCOW

Afghan Defense Minister Mohammad Fahim arrived in Moscow, once Afghanistan's sworn enemy, on Sunday for a seven-day visit, with a long shopping list of Russian military hardware for his country's nascent national army.

Fahim is the most senior member of the interim Afghan government to visit Moscow since the six-month administration took power in December.

On Monday he meets Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov to discuss plans to supply a new national Afghan army to be formed from recruits from across the country and all ethnic groups.

"We badly need to resume purchases of Russian military hardware and equipment," Fahim told Russia's Ria news agency at the weekend ahead of his visit.

In Tehran, newspapers reported that Iranian authorities have closed down the offices of dissident Afghan guerrilla leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in a move seen as trying to prove Iran's goodwill toward Afghanistan's interim government.

Newspapers said the strongly anti-American Hekmatyar, who recently voiced hostility to the presence of foreign peacekeeping troops in Afghanistan, had acted against Iranian national security.

Iran has vehemently denied U.S. charges it is trying to destabilize the fragile peace in Afghanistan by arming groups hostile to Karzai's administration.

"It's a green light to the world and the Americans that shows Iran's foreign policy is based on dialogue and friendship," Tehran University politics lecturer Hamidreza Jalaipour told Reuters.

Iran has denied interfering in Afghan affairs and rejected U.S. allegations that it was letting al Qaeda members escape from Afghanistan through Iran.