http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/316/nation/Many_at_a_loss_over_Northern_Alliance_gains+.shtml

Many at a loss over Northern Alliance gains

By Anne Barnard and Yvonne Abraham, Globe Staff, 11/12/2001

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan - If the Northern Alliance's advances against the Taliban yesterday raised spirits in Washington, here in Pakistan, where distrust for the US-backed force runs deep, the cheers were decidedly faint.

The last thing most Pakistanis want is for the Northern Alliance to control Afghanistan. That worry came to the fore yesterday as opposition commanders said they had retaken their old base, Taloqan, and, in spite of pressure from the United States, refused to rule out marching on the capital, Kabul.

''Everyone, all the people of Pakistan, 140 million, believe that the Northern Alliance is not our friend,'' said Nawaz Raza, president of the Rawalpindi-Islamabad Press Club, who led an antiwar protest in Rawalpindi yesterday.

''They will turn back to 20 years before. They will make problems for Pakistan.''

Many in Pakistan blame the opposition commanders for infighting that killed thousands in Kabul after the commanders took control there in 1992, scholars and military specialists said. Pakistanis see the Northern Alliance, dominated by Tajiks, Uzbeks, and other ethnic minorities, as hostile to Afghanistan's Pashtun majority, Pakistan's traditional allies. And they are suspicious of the Northern Alliance's old ties to Pakistan's rivals, India and Iran.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Aziz Ahmad Khan reiterated yesterday Pakistan's concerns about a Northern Alliance takeover.

''No single group should control Kabul,'' he said in an interview on the streets of Rawalpindi. ''This is a time of healing, not of acquisitions.''

Those worries add to a host of concerns about the war in this country, which is 97 percent Muslim: about the continuation of bombing during Ramadan, which starts this week; about civilian casualties in neighboring Afghanistan; about whether Pakistan should have demanded more from the United States for its support.

So even as the Northern Alliance gains gave the US coalition its most visible success yet, Washington found itself in the odd position of trying to rein in one ally to appease another.

Meeting with Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf, in New York Saturday, President Bush urged the Northern Alliance not to take control of Kabul alone, but to wait for the creation of a broad-based political alternative to the Taliban.

It was unclear whether the Northern Alliance would even be capable of taking Kabul without coalition support. But Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah wasn't making any promises.

''We do understand the political considerations with regard to Kabul; that's understandable,'' he said. ''From the other side, we don't want to see the policy of the US towards Afghanistan shaped by the ideas coming from Pakistan. That's not understandable for us.''

He dismissed concerns about alleged atrocities when Kabul was under Northern Alliance control, saying, ''We were the target of misinformation and disinformation by the Pakistani propaganda machine.''

The Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan was forbidden to speak to anyone without permission from Pakistani officials, three guards outside his house said.

Other problems loomed for Pakistan. Abdullah said that many Pakistanis fighting with the Taliban had been killed near Mazar-e-Sharif, and in his meetings with Bush, Musharraf reportedly did not even bring up whether the United States would release a shipment of F-16 fighter jets that Washington held up to chide Pakistan for testing a nuclear bomb.

After the Soviet Union was driven from Afghanistan in 1989 and the mujahideen factions started fighting among themselves, Pakistan backed the Pashtun-dominated groups that eventually became the Taliban regime.

The reasons were both ethnic and strategic, said Tariq Rehman, a scholar at the National Institute of Pakistan Studies. Pakistan wanted a friendly, dependent neighbor that would not distract it from defending itself against India and could be used as a base in case of war.

And it wanted a Pashtun government to keep Pashtun tribespeople on both sides of the border from agitating to unite their lands.

Another reason Pakistan distrusts the Northern Alliance, he said, is that India is believed to have provided military and financial assistance to those factions while Pakistan channeled help to the mainly Pashtun Taliban.

Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema, president of the Islamabad Policy Research Institution, said the Northern Alliance would have a hard time capturing Kabul because of the Pashtun majority there. He said he doubted the Alliance would risk angering the United States by taking Kabul, but said that it was impossible to rule out attacks by rogue factions.

Northern Alliance forces led by General Rashid Dostum have been accused of atrocities in Kabul, where 50,000 died in factional fighting. This time around, Cheema said, Kabul must remain neutral ground, ''totally spared from any kind of ravages,'' where negotiations can be held to set up a new government, ''an open city'' where ''everybody feels safe.''

Even in Mazar-e-Sharif, Northern Alliance control could backfire against the United States if its rule is perceived as less effective or more brutal than the Taliban's, said Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, the former director of the Pakistani intelligence agency, which backed the Taliban's rise.

''This opportunity should be used as face-saving for America,'' he said. ''Now they have got a toehold, call a halt to bombing in deference to [Ramadan] and start quiet negotiations with the Taliban.''

Raza, the journalist who was protesting the war, said that siding with the Northern Alliance offended Pakistanis' sense of loyalty to their erstwhile allies, the Taliban.

''If Kabul falls ... why did we give 20 years of sacrifices for the Afghan people?'' he said. ''These were friends, they can be friends again.''

-- Anonymous, November 12, 2001