Afghan rebels agree to participate in talks over power-sharing plan

Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan — The alliance that controls Afghanistan’s capital and much of its countryside agreed Tuesday to attend power-sharing talks in Germany next week. A battlefront commander claimed thousands of Taliban fighters had defected from Kunduz, the last bastion of the Islamic militia in the north.

On the front lines of northern Afghanistan it was fast becoming a winter war. Outside Taliban-held Kunduz, shivering Northern Alliance soldiers thinned out from forward positions to huddle over fires in their foxholes.

An alliance spokesman, Attiq Ullah, said alliance forces would launch what would likely be a bloody assault to take Kunduz if the Taliban did not surrender by Friday.

Alliance Gen. Mohammed Daoud said thousands of Taliban have defected from Kunduz in recent days, and defectors’ own accounts indicate at least hundreds have fled since Sunday. Dozens of Taliban fighters defected Tuesday.

Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, spokesman for the Pentagon, said that three-quarters of Afghanistan is now under anti-Taliban control. He said the situation at the only two major cities still held by the Taliban — Kunduz in the north and Kandahar in the south — was a "standoff."

The day also brought a grim reminder of the chaos and danger pervading the Afghan hinterlands.

The bullet-ridden bodies of four international journalists — slain execution-style by gunmen who pulled them from their cars on the road from Jalalabad to Kabul — were recovered by militiamen and identified by colleagues. Their deaths brought to seven the number of journalists killed covering the nearly 7-week-old conflict.

Also Tuesday, a senior U.S. official said as many as 1,500 Marines waiting on ships in the Arabian Sea could be sent to Afghanistan this week to join Army special operations troops. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that no final decision has been made and that it was uncertain what missions they would perform.

In the capital, Kabul, the Northern Alliance’s foreign minister, Abdullah, announced acceptance of a U.N. invitation to talks on setting up a broad-based government to replace the Taliban.

The top U.N. envoy to Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, said talks may begin Monday in or near Berlin, with about 30 participants from four different Afghan groupings.

While agreeing to a meeting in Europe, the head of the Northern Alliance, Burhanuddin Rabbani, told CNN on Tuesday that such a gathering would only be "symbolic" and that he would still insist that the hard decisions on Afghanistan’s future be made in the country.

At the State Department, 21 nations and the European Union assembled to consider a massive assistance program for postwar Afghanistan. Secretary of State Colin Powell said reconstruction must begin quickly, especially as winter will sharpen the hardship of refugees and other needy Afghans.

"We must act as fast as we can," he said.