‘Swat Taliban to welcome Osama’

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

MINGORA: The spokesman for the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, which controls the valley, told The Associated Press he would welcome militants bent on battling the US troops and their Arab allies if they want to settle there.
“Osama bin Laden can come here. Sure, like a brother they can stay anywhere they want,” TTP spokesman Muslim Khan said in a two-hour interview on Friday, his first with a foreign journalist since the Nizam-e-Adl Regulation was imposed. “Yes, we will help them and protect them,” he added.
The Taliban spokesman counted among his allies several groups on the UN and the US terrorist lists. “If we need, we can call them and if they need, they can call us,” Muslim Khan said. He said his forces would go to help the Taliban in Afghanistan if the United States and Nato continued to fight there. “You must tell (the Americans) if they want peace ... to withdraw their forces, keep them on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean,” he added.
Pakistan reacted with alarm to his comments, saying it would never let him shelter the likes of bin Laden. “We would have to go for the military operation. We would have to apply force again,” said Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira.
“We simply condemn this. We are fighting this war against al-Qaida and the Taliban,” he added. Meanwhile, Afrasiab Khattak, a leader of the Awami National Party, conceded: “We lost the war. We negotiated from a position of weakness.î He said the region’s police force was too underpaid, under trained and under equipped to take on the militants.
US officials said they would work with Pakistan to make sure militants were not safe anywhere. “With regard to Mulla Omar and Osama bin Laden, this is not a place where they should be welcome. We believe ... that violent extremists need to be confronted,î State Department spokesman Robert Wood said.
Reiterating America’s viewpoint on this, Wood said, “Violent extremism needs to be confronted not just by Pakistan, but the entire international community.” Asserting that the US would continue to work with the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan to try to help root out these violent extremists, Wood said they were a threat to democracy and stability in the region. “We call on all those who are interested in bringing about stability to that region to work with us to root out violent extremism,” Wood said.

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