US-led forces to pull out of western Afghanistan: commander
KABUL, March 14 (AFP) - The US-led military will pull out its troops from western Afghanistan this summer and move them to the restive south and east to tackle Taliban militants, a US commander said Monday.
NATO-led peacekeepers who arrived early this month will then take over the American operations in the west, said Colonel Phillip Bookert, commander of coalition forces in western Afghanistan.
"I think I'm handing over a very stable situation," the colonel told reporters in Kabul, adding that the new locations for the US troops had not yet been decided.
Washington has strongly pressed for the 8,300-strong NATO-led International Security Assistance Force to expand into Afghanistan's remote and rugged west in a bid to reduce pressure on stretched American forces in Iraq and worldwide.
An initial deployment of Italian troops started to arrive on March 2 in the main western city of Herat, where they will later be joined by soldiers from Spain, Greece and Lithuania.
Bookert's 2,400-strong force, which includes soldiers from Afghanistan's new national army, will hand over of reconstruction teams working in the provinces of Herat, Farah, Ghor and Badghis. All except Ghor border Iran in the west.
One team, in Farah province, will remain under the control of US forces, the colonel said.
The US-dominated coalition has more than 18,000 soldiers who are hunting down Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants since it toppled the ultra-Islamic regime at the end of 2001.
ISAF has been deployed in Afghanistan under a United Nations mandate for the same period of time, but only came under full NATO command in 2003.
Until now its troops have been deployed in the Afghan capital Kabul and the north of the country. In February NATO defence ministers agreed at a meeting in Nice, France, to move its rebuilding efforts into the west.
Pak's Khan and Mehmood met Osama: Report
Press Trust Of India
Posted online: Sunday, April 03, 2005 at 1331 hours IST
Updated: Sunday, April 03, 2005 at 1335 hours IST
New Delhi, April 3: Pakistani scientists Abdul Qadeer Khan and Sultan Bashiruddin Mehmood had held meetings with Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders, exchanged letters with militant organisations like the Lashkar-e-Toiba and attended their gatherings and rallies, a media report said.
"When the CIA searched Sultan Bashiruddin Mehmood's UTN (Umma Tameere-Nau) office in Kabul, they found large amounts of data on the construction and maintenance of nuclear weapons from the Kahuta laboratories. It also found letters exchanged between the UTN and islamist extremist organisations including Lashkar-e-Toiba", a report in Pakistani weekly said.
Mehmood, a close confidante of A.Q. Khan and a former Director of Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, was arrested on October 23, 2001, at the headquarters of the UTN which he had set up for 'humanitarian work in Afghanistan, it said.
Quoting the famed journal Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the article said Khan and Mehmood and other scientists of his organisation 'attended Lashkar-e-Toiba gatherings'.
Khan also appeared in the rallies of the LeT headed by Hafeez Saeed. The militant outfit, which later changed its name to Jamaat al-Dawaa after being banned, "is alleged to have helped in equipping Al Qaeda with 'dirty bombs', the article said.
Mehmood, who was used to enrich uranium in Pakistan's Khushab plant, and Khan were also known to have held meetings with top Al Qaeda leaders including Osama bin Laden, the paper said.
The Friday Times said Mehmood "may have been a genius but he was crazy in his religious zeal" and had a firm belief that plutonium enrichment in Pakistan "should not be kept secret and should be passed around to islamic countries to challenge Israel and the West. He also had expert knowledge of the global nuclear black market".
After his arrest, Mehmood had denied he had ever met bin Laden. However, after months of questioning "he admitted to having met Osama, Al Zawhiri and other Al Qaeda members repeatedly, including on the day Al Qaeda struck in New York" (9/11).
The weekly said, "this time he (Mehmood) disclosed that he discussed the bombing of an American city with nuclear weapons. He told the CIA that Osama had obtained fissile material from the islamic movement of Uzbekistan of Tahir Yuldashev, recently said to be in hiding in South Waziristan. Mehmood said he had passed on information on nuclear technology to Osama, but had not discussed creating a Hiroshima-like nuclear blast in America".
When he was thereafter subjected to a lie detector test, he failed it", the weekly said.
http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=44314
Note: This is from an Indian newspaper