Taliban returning via Pakistan: Afghan UN envoy

United Nations, July 27: The Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan is backed by foreign money, terror networks and fighters coming over the border from Pakistan, the top UN envoy in Afghanistan has said.

But Tom Koenigs, the special UN representative, said the Pakistan government was not backing the Taliban, as it once did, because the militant Islamists were a threat to its stability as well.

''We face a Taliban movement, which has apparently recovered and has to be answered by a series of measures, political as well as military,'' he told reporters yesterday after briefing the UN Security Council.

Koenigs called the Taliban an insurgency that had taken hold in five Afghan southern provinces rather than just carrying out ''some isolated terrorist acts.'' In the past three months, hundreds of people have been killed in hit-and-run raids and suicide bombings by Taliban guerrillas and their Islamic allies in the most intense period of the insurgency since the Taliban were removed from power in 2001 for harboring Osama bin Laden.

Helped by villagers resentful of foreigners and poorly paid Afghan government forces, their aim is to regain power to replace the government of President Hamid Karzai. Some 8,000 NATO troops have begun to deploy in the south.

Koenigs, a German diplomat, said the Afghan government and its allies needed to focus on development and good government, or ''it will not be possible to end this insurgency.'' He recalled that the 2001 Bonn conference, which set up a road map for a new government in Afghanistan, excluded the Taliban from a peace deal so they had no compulsion about reorganizing themselves.

''The Taliban were driven out of the country,'' Koenigs said of the American-led invasion after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. ''They are defeated, but they have not been destroyed.'' But he said their re-emergence could not be accomplished without outside financial support from international terrorist networks and unnamed nations as well as porous borders.

''There are international elements in it -- cross-border fighters coming from the neighboring country and being trained and also financed from other countries and in other countries,'' Koenigs said.

But he said he did not know who financed them and that not ''even the CIA'' knew where Al Qaeda got its money.

Reuters