Pak general denies Taliban link

Pakistan's former interior minister, Major General Naseerullah Babar (retd), has strongly denied a rediff.com column which says he and General Pervez Musharraf had been sent to Afghanistan in 1994 to 'convince Mullah Omar' to forge a force which later became the Taliban.

In The curious case of Amjad Farooqi, Indian strategic analyst and Pakistan expert B Raman had said in 1994, Asif Zardari, husband of then Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto, wanted a cotton consignment being imported by Pakistan from Turkeministan be sent by road via Afghanistan.

According to Raman, after mujahideen groups operating in the Herat area of Afghanistan looted the first two convoys from Turkmenistan, Zardari sent Babar and Musharraf to Afghanistan to convince Omar to collect students from the Pakistani madrassas and make a Taliban force to protect the convoys.

'This is cock and bull story,' says Babar in a response mailed to rediff.com

'First,

the Taliban looted no convoy of cotton imported from Turkeministan. Actually relief goods sent by the government of Pakistan for the people of Afghanistan in 1994 or in 1995 were looted by some people in that country. The Taliban were already a dominant force in Afghanistan and in place. As Pakistan's interior minister then I had traveled to Afghanistan and talked with its leadership after which there were no attacks on convoys of relief goods,' Babar said.

'To say that we offered Pakistani madrassas students be employed as a force which would ultimately give birth to the Taliban government is the product of some fertile imagination but has no basis in truth.

'Secondly, Asif Zardari was never involved in the import of cotton from Turkemenistan. Cotton was imported by the trading corporation of the country and Asif had nothing to do with it,' Babar asserts.

B Raman, when contacted, said he stood by the story, which was '100 percent correct.'