November 16, 2001	Friday	Shaba'an 29, 1422

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KABUL, Nov 15: Afghanistan’s victorious Northern Alliance opposition forces came under increasing pressure on Thursday to share power in an interim administration amid signs the Taliban may be ready to talk.

Alliance officials said the Taliban’s deputy interior minister, Haji Mullah Khaksar, had chosen to stay in Kabul despite the collapse of the hardline Islamic regime.

“Khaksar is still here. He has willingly opted to stay in Kabul. We have not captured him. This was his own choice,” said an official outside the deputy minister’s residence in the capital.

It was not immediately clear why the close aide to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar had stayed behind as Taliban forces evacuated the city overnight on Monday.

But the relatively liberal intellectual is known to favour a broad-based government for Afghanistan, the kind of setup being touted by the United States, Pakistan and the United Nations as the best solution to end the country’s civil war.

Mullah Omar however appeared in no mood to talk, saying he would rather die than share power with an “evil” administration. “We will not accept a government of wrong-doers. We prefer death than to be part of an evil government,” he said in an interview with the BBC’s Pashto-language service.

The Northern Alliance has wasted no time taking control of the Kabul administration despite stepped-up US and UN efforts to promote a multi-ethnic government to fill the political void in Afghanistan.

It has formed a supreme military and security cabinet to oversee the gathering of a proposed national unity council, which is supposed to include representatives from the Alliance as well as supporters of the former king.

The move has fuelled concern that the ethnic minority factions in the alliance, some of which ruled Kabul with disastrous results from 1992-96, are trying to take matters into their own hands.

The UN Security Council on Wednesday unanimously voted a resolution calling on member states to provide military and other support for security arrangements in areas not controlled by the Taliban.—AFP