Thursday 5 May 2011 14.33 BST
- Article history
Thousands of Afghans have attended a heated rally in Kabul decrying peace talks with the Taliban in a show of strength by those opposing any return to power of the hardline movement.
Crowds carrying green flags and wearing ribbons of the newly established National Movement gathered under a vast series of tented canopies in the capital days after the event was called on Monday – the same day that news broke that Osama bin Laden had been killed by US special forces in Pakistan.
The killing of the man who was sheltered by the Taliban regime in the 1990s has prompted heady speculation that an "end game" to the 10-year conflict could now be at hand, with the Afghan government under President Hamid Karzai and the Taliban-led insurgency striking a deal.
But "deal making" were dirty words to the crowd gathered at the rally in Kabul on Thursday morning. Banners lining the tent said "We didn't vote for Karzai to make deals," and "Don't sacrifice justice for dealing."
Speeches were interrupted several times by chants from the crowd of "Death to the Taliban. Death to the suicide bombers. Death to the Punjabis" – a reference to the demonstrators' view that the Taliban is under the control of Pakistan's spy service.
The event was organised by Amrullah Saleh, the country's former spy chief and outspoken critic of Karzai's efforts to reach out to the Taliban.
Saleh, a burly and comparatively young man who earned the respect of the CIA during his sometimes brutal leadership of Afghanistan's intelligence service, received a rapturous reception from the flag-waving crowd when he marched into the tent with a phalanx of bodyguards.
Speaking to a crowd that organisers claimed, not unreasonably, was about 15,000 strong, Saleh said he had "for years" warned that al-Qaida and the Taliban were being protected in Pakistan, something that had been "proved" by the killing of Bin Laden in a Pakistani garrison town this week.
Saleh said efforts to reach out to the Taliban ignored what he claimed was the vast majority of people who oppose the insurgents. And he expressed anger at Karzai's description of the Taliban as disaffected "brothers".
"They are not my brother, they are not your brother – those are our enemies," he told the cheering crowd.
Since being sacked by Karzai last year, Saleh has been developing a political profile for himself, travelling the northern regions of the country to warn people of Karzai's peace plans and recruit people to his cause.
But Thursday's event, held outside a gaudy wedding hall on one of the city's busiest roads, appeared to be a deliberate effort by the party to burst on to the national scene as a force to be reckoned with.
Unusually for a political rally in Afghanistan, the master of ceremonies was a woman, who welcomed the crowds and introduced the speakers.
It appeared part of an effort to highlight the Taliban's harsh treatment of women, who during the Taliban government were restricted from education, employment and even venturing out of their homes without a male relative.
Although aides to Saleh said he had been planning the event for the past two weeks, his rapid mobilisation of so many people since Monday highlighted one of the main pitfalls on the road to a possible negotiated peace with the Taliban – that it would not be accepted by many Afghans, particularly those who are not Pashtuns, the country's largest ethnic group.
Some have even warned that a rapid peace deal could rekindle civil war in the country, particularly as the strongest opposition to a Taliban return to power comes from within the ranks of the Northern Alliance, the old coalition of largely non-Pashtun communities from the north of the country who fought bitterly against the Taliban takeover of the country in the 1990s.
Saleh himself was an aide to Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance who was assassinated days before 9/11 on the orders of Bin Laden.
Although Saleh described the anti-Taliban movement as a non-tribal group covering the whole nation, at the rally on Thursday the audience appeared to be disproportionately made up of northerners, with a heavy representation of burly men from Panjshir, a valley north of Kabul that resisted the Taliban, who were assisting with security and crowd control.
Western diplomats have long warned that any political arrangement to bring the conflict to a close must not be, in the words of one, "a Pashtun-to-Pashtun stitch-up". But there is little sign that Karzai has succeeded in getting national buy-in for his peace plans.
Last year the Afghan president hosted a national "peace jirga" designed to win a national mandate for pursuing peace plans. Unfortunately the event, which was boycotted by most of the leading non-Pashtun warlords and civil war leaders, was criticised by some for being unrepresentative.
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