Promises flow as Karzai wins US hearts

29 Jan, 2002 09:01 AM5 mins to read

KANDAHAR - United States President George W. Bush met visiting Afghan leader Hamid Karzai for the first time yesterday and after six al Qaeda fighters were killed when Afghan troops, supported by US forces, stormed a hospital in the southern city of Kandahar to end a long stand-off.

In Washington, Bush rolled out the red carpet for Karzai and said the US would help establish and train a new Afghan military and "bail out" foreign peacekeepers if they ran into trouble in the ruined country.

Bush said the US would not commit troops to a peacekeeping force, instead helping a British-led force in Kabul with intelligence and logistics.

"Chairman Karzai, I reaffirm to you today that the US will continue to be a friend to the Afghan people in the challenges that lie ahead," Bush said after the Oval Office meeting.

"We will also support programmes to train new police officers and help to establish and train an Afghanistan national military.

"Better yet than peacekeepers - which will be there for a while with our help - let's have Afghanistan have her own military."

The US also announced it was releasing $US223 million ($528 million) in previously blocked assets to Afghanistan's interim government and detailed provisions of its pledge of $US296.75 million in Afghan aid.

Karzai pledged his support for America's war on terrorism and said many Afghans wanted the multinational peacekeeping force to spread throughout his homeland after more than two decades of war.

"This joint struggle of terrorism should go to the absolute end," Karzai said. "We must finish them. We must bring them out of their caves and hide-outs. And we promise we'll do that."

Bush earlier met his top security advisers to debate whether Taleban and al Qaeda detainees being held at a US military base in Cuba should be covered by the 1949 Geneva Convention's provisions for war-time treatment of prisoners.

The White House said Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney-General John Ashcroft and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice all agreed the captives should not be granted such status because they were not conventional soldiers.

Saudi Arabia said yesterday that about 100 Saudi men were among the prisoners held at the Camp X-Ray prison in Cuba and that it was in contact with the US about them.

"We demand that they be subject to the kingdom's laws," Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef said, without elaborating.

As attention focused on the prisoners in Cuba, a US human rights group said the world was ignoring the plight of 3000 to 3500 other combatants, mostly Afghans and Pakistanis, held in a filthy jail at Shebarghan, northern Afghanistan.

"They are dying. More will probably die if the US does not take swift and assertive action," said Leonard Rubenstein, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights.

"There has been a great deal of attention to Guantanamo [in Cuba], but almost no attention to conditions within Afghanistan."

Karzai is also scheduled to visit the ruins of the World Trade Center in New York and to address the UN Security Council during his US visit.

In a sign of the warmth with which the Afghan leader is being received, he is widely expected to be Bush's guest when the President delivers his annual State of the Union speech to Congress today.

In Afghanistan, the latest operation to root out pockets of Taleban and al Qaeda resistance ended in bloodshed as Afghan forces launched an assault on the hospital where the rebels had been holed up in a seven-week standoff.

The attack started before dawn with a rattle of automatic fire and two explosions.

"Go, Go!" an American voice was heard shouting as Afghans cleared the wing room by room, throwing grenades followed by rapid single rounds and bursts of automatic fire.

The al Qaeda fighters, besieged on the first floor, ignored at least two ultimatums, refused offers to negotiate a surrender and fought fiercely.

"They were fighting to the last moment of their lives," said provincial government spokesman Khalid Pashtoon, who announced the deaths of all six Arabs.

The al Qaeda fighters, who had threatened to blow themselves up if anyone but a doctor entered their ward, were among a 19-strong group of wounded men brought to the hospital just before the city fell to anti-Taleban forces on December 7.

Some of the group escaped, US forces arrested two others after they were tricked into leaving their ward and one wounded fighter blew himself up with a grenade. Afghan soldiers had tried in vain to coax the remaining fighters to surrender.

Meanwhile, Pakistani intelligence sources told CBS News that Osama bin Laden underwent clandestine kidney dialysis in a Pakistani military hospital the day before members of his al Qaeda network launched attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Bin Laden received the treatment at a military hospital in Rawalpindi.

A nurse told CBS that the hospital's urology department was cleared of its usual staff, who were replaced with another group of medical workers.

Hospital officials and the Pakistani Government denied the reports.

- REUTERS

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