Anti-Taliban Meeting - Armed Assistance Offered
Compiled by Selwyn Manning
The Moscow Times is reporting discussions of an Anti-Taliban Meeting that was held in Dushanbe, Tajikistan - where senior diplomats from Russia, India, Iran, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan met representatives of Afghanistan's anti-Taliban alliance in Dushanbe on Thursday.
There they discussed the possibility of rendering military, technical and humanitarian assistance to the anti-Taliban coalition, Tajikistan's Foreign Ministry official said.
Tajikistan shares a border with Afghanistan and its frontier is still patrolled by Russian troops.
The fate of Afghanistan's anti-Taliban alliance has received new international attention, with talk of possible retaliation against the Taliban for hosting militant Osama bin Laden, linked by U.S. officials to Tuesday's attacks on the United States.
Anti-Taliban soldiers fired a missile attack on Taliban strongholds on Tuesday [New Zealand time] in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the USA. It was thought at first the explosions in Kabul were a retaliatory response by the USA in the hours after the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.