January 11, 2002	Friday	Shawwal 26, 1422

KABUL: US bombing raids in Afghanistan should be better coordinated with Kabul’s interim administration now that targets in the war against terrorism are becoming ever harder to find, Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah said on Tuesday.

Coordination has not been as close as Kabul would like and the newly appointed ministers have brought this up with US authorities, he told Reuters in an interview.

US bombing raids have recently prompted calls for a halt from villagers in areas under attack after hundreds of civilians were reportedly hit, but Abdullah said the war on terror was popular in Afghanistan and would continue.

“The targets are not the mass targets that they used to be, like large bases of the Taliban,” Abdullah said.

“It is pockets of the Taliban or Al Qaeda hiding here and there, so it needs more coordination.”

Coordination on bombing targets was “not exactly the way we expect”, he said. “I think the presence of one senior (American) officer in Kabul to be in contact with our Ministry of Defence would improve it.”

Abdullah said he had mentioned bombing coordination in general terms with Zalmay Khalilzad, the visiting US envoy for Afghanistan, and thought the Defence Ministry had also mentioned it to the US military.

But Khalilzad told a news conference the issue of bombing coordination had not come up in his talks with Afghan leaders in Kabul.

US bombing was instrumental in defeating the Taliban movement last November and flushing out radical Muslim fighters from Al Qaeda, the network led by Osama bin Laden.

But recent raids have been more narrowly targeted on small areas or moving convoys, leading to charges from residents that the people killed were innocent civilians rather than Taliban or Al Qaeda fighters.

Abdullah said he was sure almost all of around 60 people killed in one such attack in late December were Taliban supporters, even though residents said 107 innocent people had died.

Last week the United Nations cited reports of 52 civilians killed and said it knew of no traces of Taliban activity in the eastern Afghan village of Qalaye Niazi with no trace of Taliban in the area.

“There were mainly Taliban among those almost 60 people who were killed,” Abdullah said. “There were a few casualties among the civilians as well, unfortunately.”

“Of course the people on the spot...would not like to see the bombing in their area,” he added.

But the war against terrorism was popular in Afghanistan, Abdullah said, and it would only end “when all of us are sure there are no pockets of terrorism — Al Qaeda or Taliban — left in Afghanistan that they can harass us sometime in the future”.

He said “all of us” meant the Afghan people, the Kabul interim government and the international coalition helping Afghanistan root out extremists.

Interim government leader Hamid Karzai denied reports that some members of his government had called for a halt to the US bombing.

“There isn’t anybody in our administration that says this needs to stop,” Karzai told the BBC.

“There is no war in Afghanistan. There is the pursuit of terrorism in Afghanistan the campaign is on to get the last remnants of terrorism, to finish them completely and to take them to justice,” he said.

Abdullah said some Afghans providing targeting information to the US military might have called in airstrikes on their rivals instead of suspected Taliban, leading to the charge of civilian casualties.

“There might have been cases, on one or two occasions, that a group might have misused this opportunity (to suggest airstrikes) against its rival,” he said. “But with coordination with central authorities, these types of mistakes might be prevented.”

Abdullah also said Kabul wanted funds for rebuilding its army included in reconstruction funds to be supplied by the international community.

“There has to be a contribution for security,” he said. “In order to have security and stability all over the country, we need to have a national security force. We need a national army.

“There is a price for having such a thing in Afghanistan,” he said. “That should also be calculated in contributions for the reconstruction of Afghanistan.”

Abdullah plans to attend an international meeting on January 21-22 in Tokyo to discuss aid for Afghanistan. The World Bank and the United Nations have said reconstruction costs will be about $9 billion over the next five years.—Reuters