Copyright 2001 Omaha World-Herald

Reprinted with permission

October 27, 2001, Saturday SUNRISE EDITION
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 1A
HEADLINE: UNO tied to talks on Afghan leadership
By Stephen Buttry
World-Herald Staff Writer
A former ambassador now teaching at the University of Nebraska at Omaha met
in recent months with three key Afghan leaders, seeking to arrange a meeting to
lay the groundwork for a post-Taliban government.
According to news reports Friday, two of the three primary leaders involved
in the unofficial shuttle diplomacy of UNO's Peter Tomsen have been killed.
The Taliban's Bakhtar news agency reported Friday that Afghanistan's ruling
Islamic regime had executed opposition leader Abdul Haq, a hero of the war
against the Soviet Union and a friend of Tomsen's since 1989.
Haq visited Tomsen in Italy in May, asking him to help bring together
Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massood and former king Mohammad Zaher Shah
to make plans for a provisional government to lead Afghanistan if the Taliban
can be overthrown.
Tomsen was briefly unable to speak Friday, overcome with emotion after
learning of Haq's execution.
"I talked to him on the phone four days ago," Tomsen said. "I knew he was
going into Afghanistan but he didn't say when and how...He was first and
foremost an Afghan patriot. He wanted freedom for Afghanistan from outsiders."
Tomsen, a career diplomat, was the special envoy to Afghanistan under former
President George Bush from 1989 to 1992 and later served as ambassador to
Armenia. He joined UNO as ambassador in residence in 1999.
Tomsen met Sept. 8-9 in Rome with the exiled king and was stranded in
Newfoundland on his way back when air travel was suspended after the Sept. 11
attack on America.
Earlier, Tomsen met in Tajikistan with Haq and Massood, who was assassinated
Sept. 9.
"These are two guys who are really heroes in Afghanistan who have been
killed," said Thomas Gouttierre, director of UNO's Center for Afghanistan
Studies.

Gouttierre, who had known Haq since 1984, visited with him earlier this year
during a brief stop at Eppley Airfield.
Tomsen's informal meetings helped pave the way for a meeting planned for
next week in Ankara, Turkey, between representatives of the Northern Alliance
and the king.
Official U.S. and United Nations diplomats entered the negotiations after
Sept. 11, but Tomsen remains involved. An interview in his Omaha office this
week was interrupted by a call from Rome, as an aide to the king briefed him.
A California congressman urged Secretary of State Colin Powell to involve
Tomsen further in diplomacy.
"I would recommend you might try Peter Tomsen, who is an old Afghan hand and
is available," Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., told Powell Wednesday at a
meeting of the House International Relations Committee.
Tomsen's most recent dealings with Afghan leaders began in May, when he was
vacationing in Tuscany. Haq came with San Diego businessman James Ritchie to see
Tomsen after a visit with the king.
Over Parmesan cheese and Chianti at Tomsen's vacation villa, Haq asked
Tomsen to meet with Massood. Tomsen agreed. He flew to Haq's home in Dubai, then
together they went to Tajikistan to meet with Massood.
Tomsen first met the two war heroes in 1989, when he went to Afghanistan as
Bush's envoy. Though the United States supported their war against the Soviets,
Tomsen said he told the guerrilla leaders, "You must realize you have not been
chosen by the Afghan people. Still missing is an act of self-determination."
In interviews this week and in his meetings with the Afghan leaders, Tomsen
stressed the importance of finding a system for Afghans to choose their own
leadership, without undue U.S. influence. For too long, he said, outsiders such
as Soviets, Pakistanis and Arabs have chosen the governments of Afghanistan.
"The political objective should be a political entity that represents the
will of the Afghan people," Tomsen said during the June 23-24 meeting at
Massood's home in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Massood, Haq and Tomsen met in pairs and
all together during eight hours of talks.
Ritchie videotaped about an hour of Tomsen's final talk with Massood. They
spoke through an interpreter around the dining room table of Massood's Dushanbe
home with Syed Hussein Anwari, another Northern Alliance commander.
Massood acknowledged the popularity of the 86-year-old former king, but

bluntly said he could not lead from Rome. "If we announce him as the head of the
state and he doesn't come, we are destroying our own legitimacy."
Tomsen and Massood discussed plans to form an interim government
representing all of Afghanistan's ethnic groups. That government, headed by the
king, would convene a Loya Jirga, Afghanistan's traditional national assembly
for solving problems or making important decisions. The Loya Jirga would
determine how to choose a permanent government.
As Massood's urging, Tomsen stopped in Rome July 1 and urged the king to
take a strong anti-Taliban position.
Though he was traveling unofficially, Tomsen briefed State Department and
congressional officials before and after the trip. He would not disclose who
reimbursed his travel expenses.
At the early September meeting with the king, Tomsen "pushed the more
concrete ideas" and urged his support for the Loya Jirga process.
"Zaher Shah is the only shred, and it's only a shred, of legitimacy on the
devastated Afghan political landscape," Tomsen said.
The attack on New York and Washington two days after Massood's assassination
and Tomsen's second visit with the king suddenly made Afghanistan a top U.S.
priority.
Tomsen is hopeful that Haq's reported execution will not keep the official
negotiations next week in Turkey and in the weeks ahead from finishing the
process he started informally.
"What the attack did," Tomsen said, "was accelerate the process and put the
U.S. government behind it."
GRAPHIC: B&W Photo/1 UNO's Peter Tomsen, a career diplomat, has been working
toward laying the groundwork for a post-Taliban government.; KENT SIEVERS/THE
WORLD-HERALD/1
Copyright 2001 Omaha World-Herald
Reprinted with permission
October 28, 2001, Sunday SUNRISE EDITION
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 15A;
HEADLINE: '99 Omaha dialogue discussed post-Taliban future
By Stephen Buttry
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER
From various corners of their weary land and various exile havens, 13 Afghan

leaders gathered in Omaha two years ago in hope of building a foundation for
peace and stability.
"In the past, we fought each other. But we always regretted why this
happened," one of the men said to his American hosts and fellow Afghans. "We
know religiously, morally, we should not be in this situation. So, we should
build on this as a pillar of peace."
The men hoping to build on the pillar represented most of the regions and
ethnic groups of a fractious country that attracted little attention in U.S.
foreign policy in 1999 but commands center stage today.
They visited the Midlands for five weeks starting June 18, 1999, and
gathered for eight meetings at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. The
conference was arranged and moderated by Thomas Gouttierre, director of UNO's
Center for Afghanistan Studies.
Gouttierre patterned the talks after a series of dialogues among leaders of
Tajikistan since 1993. He has led 33 conferences, mostly meeting in Russia but
once in Omaha. The conferences were funded by private foundations.
He said the sessions have brought together leaders of rival Tajik groups for
informal discussions that preceded formal breakthroughs on such matters as a
cease-fire in the nation's civil war and forming a constitution.
Seeking similar results in Afghanistan, Gouttierre sought and won a $
120,000 grant from the U.S. State Department. The money paid to bring Afghan
religious, military, tribal, political and professional leaders to Omaha for a
program called the Afghanistan Civil Society Dialogue.
Their central purpose, Gouttierre said, was to discuss ways to form a stable
government in anticipation of the fall of the Taliban regime.
"We selected people on the basis of having something for a post-Taliban
period. We believed at that time that the Taliban would eventually fail,"
Gouttierre said. "What we did was invite people from those various groups that
were not connected with the Taliban."
Gouttierre and Peter Tomsen, ambassador in residence at UNO, objected to the
characterization in an Oct. 21 Chicago Tribune story that some of the visitors
"worked closely" with the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist
network. The Tribune cited unnamed State Department officials.
All 13 of the Afghan visitors "were people in opposition to the Taliban who
are not connected in any way with Osama bin Laden," Gouttierre said.

He said the group included a tribal leader who faced an assassination threat
from the Taliban and a senior adviser to Ahmed Shah Massood, the Northern
Alliance commander who was assassinated Sept. 9.
The Tribune story quoted a confidential "transcript" of the UNO meetings.
Gouttierre released to The World-Herald an 11,000-word report of the meetings.
It reads at times like an actual transcript and at times like a summary of
longer conversations. The report is in English, though all the men, except
Tomsen, spoke in Dari, the Persian language most widely spoken in Afghanistan.
Gouttierre released the report on condition that the Afghans who attended
not be identified, for their protection.
"We need to keep things from this meeting confidential," one of the men says
in the report.
"We know something may happen to us," another explained.
The report reveals that the group discussed the Taliban at length but spent
little time talking about bin Laden or his al-Qaida terrorist network based in
Afghanistan.
Bin Laden's name appears only in a brief discussion of the 1998 missile
attack on his Afghanistan facilities, in response to the bombings of U.S.
embassies in Africa.
The report quotes several of the Afghans criticizing the Taliban. "I do not
feel safe and secure in my home since the Taliban came," one said.
Some came to the meeting not from Afghanistan but from Pakistan or other
nations where they lived in exile, including the United States. Tomsen said
others sneaked out of Afghanistan for the meeting by varying routes, through
Tajikistan, Pakistan and Iran.
Seven of the men were Pashtun, the nation's largest ethnic group and the
group from which the Taliban leaders come. About half of the participants were
recommended to UNO leaders for the conference by Abdul Haq, the Pashtun
opposition leader the Taliban executed Friday.
The report notes the absence of Taliban voices at the Omaha conference.
"We are not representing all Afghans," one man said. "There are very
religiously strict people in Afghanistan. We are missing our Taliban brothers.
Their presence would have helped."

Another Afghan added: "I agree that the Taliban should be included. Why
aren't they here?"
Gouttierre responded that Taliban leaders declined to come.
"We invited three through the Taliban embassy in Islamabad. They said there
was no need to have a dialogue because they control 90 percent of Afghanistan.
We also need others here, for example women. In the future we will also try to
include Taliban representatives."
Taliban leaders had visited UNO separately. The World-Herald reported in
1998 that two Taliban government ministers had visited in May of that year.
Gouttierre confirmed that another group including Taliban ministers visited in
December 1997.
Both meetings were connected with a short-lived UNO project in which the
university worked with the Taliban to teach trade skills in Afghanistan. That
project was funded by Unocal, an oil company hoping to build a pipeline across
the country.
Gouttierre said the university filed reports on the meeting to the State
Department.
Before and after the Sept. 11 attack on America, Gouttierre said, he has
briefed State Department, Defense Department and CIA officials on Afghanistan
issues.
The report of the 1999 meeting reveals many disagreements among the Afghan
factions. But they agreed on two important matters:
They supported a Loya Jirga, Afghanistan's traditional grand assembly. The
UNO visitors concluded their final meeting July 20 by agreeing on a statement
that the Loya Jirga "should be assembled in such a way that all ethnic groups
and nationalities residing in the country should participate in it."
They opposed interference in Afghan affairs by outsiders with interests in
Afghanistan. The visitors saw the Taliban as unduly influenced by Pakistan and
Arab sponsors. Earlier presidents were seen as stooges for Pakistan or the
Soviet Union.
The joint agreement supported United Nations supervision of Afghanistan's
selection of a national leader.
The Afghans wanted to continue the dialogue started at UNO in 1999. "Let's
not stop with these meetings. Let's continue, even step up future efforts to
resolve our differences," one leader said.

Gouttierre and Tomsen were frustrated that the State Department did not
finance subsequent conferences in 2000 and this year.
"Not only did we not get a negative answer, we didn't get any answer,"
Tomsen said. If the Omaha dialogue had continued, he said, current efforts to
unite anti-Taliban leaders "would have been much further along."
SIDEBAR HEADLINE: Afghan leaders came armed with their poetry
By Stephen Buttry
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER
Amid all the talk of war and politics, Afghan leaders who gathered in Omaha
in 1999 found their strongest eloquence in poems and stories.
One man explained why peace is so elusive in a country divided by two
decades of war: "A young boy was witness to the massacre of other members of his
family. ... He was homeless and forced to beg on the streets. Someone asked
him: What will you do when you grow up? Answer: I will kill those who murdered
my family. Then I will kill those who were supposed to protect my family."
In case his hosts didn't get the point, the storyteller said: "This is the
way our society thinks."
The Afghans urged U.S. assistance in achieving peace and stability in their
homeland, but cautioned against interfering as heavily as outsiders such as the
former Soviet Union, Pakistan and Osama bin Laden.
One visitor recited a poem about a man who "saved a sheep from the fangs of
a wolf," then ate the sheep himself. The sheep's soul cried out: "I thought you
saved me, but you are the real wolf."
"Please don't do this to Afghanistan," the Afghan implored.
He cited a second poem:
"You did not close the gate.
When water flowed.
Then it turned into a flood."
Thomas Gouttierre, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the
University of Nebraska at Omaha, speaking in Dari to his guests, said poetry
"culturally interprets Afghan thoughts elegantly."

He recalled that Kushal Khan "was the ideal poet/warrior. Today,

unfortunately, there are far too many warriors, not enough poets."