| Moscow found help for him The legendary Lev of Pandshera - the leader of the Northern Alliance of Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Massoud - on Saturday left the front of the battle with the Taliban in the Afghan province of Takhor for several hours to arrive in the Tajik capital to meet with Boris Shikhmuradov, the special representative of the President of Turkmenistan for the Caspian Sea and the Afghan settlement. The two-hour rendezvous, held at the Dushanbe Hotel, was private. Massoud and the Turkmen special envoy decided not to make any public statements to the press based on its results. However, the Vremya Novostey newspaper became aware of some details of this meeting, which turned out to be the final chord of Ashgabat’s current peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan. Prior to this, Mr. Shikhmuradov visited Tehran, Kandahar, Kabul and Islamabad, where he met with the leaders of Iran, Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban movement. To all of them, like Massoud, the Turkmen diplomat conveyed a message from his President Saparmurat Niyazov with specific proposals to all key participants in the conflict for its peaceful resolution. Its main content boils down to the following: the Taliban and the northerners opposing them are invited to abandon attempts to solve the Afghan problem by military means, recognize each other as a real military-political factor in Afghanistan and resume peace negotiations on this basis. Their first result should be a long-term suspension of hostilities, after which Kandahar should recognize Masoud’s right to autonomously govern a certain zone in the north of the country, and then negotiate the creation of a coalition government of Afghanistan with the participation of representatives of the Northern Alliance.
The main prerequisite for such agreements was the readiness of the main external sponsors of the Afghan conflict - Iran and Pakistan - brought by the Turkmen envoy from Tehran and Islamabad - to “push” their “clients”, respectively Massoud and the Taliban movement, to the need to fix in one way or another the existing status quo based on division of zones of influence. The problem is that Afghan adversaries have a catastrophic lack of trust in each other.
Nice words from Islamabad are not enough for Massoud - for the northern leader, the only evidence of Pakistani leader General Mussharaf's willingness to accept reality can only be a cessation of the offensive on his positions. “I’m tired of killing the Taliban, they are Afghans too,” Lev Pandshera remarked irritably in Dushanbe.
According to some evidence, Massoud is no less irritated by Moscow’s attempts to “throw in” his “sworn friend” to help him - General Dostum, one of the former leaders of the northern provinces, expelled from Afghanistan by the Taliban two years ago. A week ago he was received in Moscow and promised to provide serious military-technical assistance, including combat helicopters. Now Dostum is traveling around the Central Asian capitals of the CIS in search of support there too. If the general, artificially inflated from the outside, again joins the Afghan “guerrilla”, the chances of stopping it will become even more slim. Arkady DUBNOV, Dushanbe |
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