Chasing A Man, Fixing A Nation.(interview with Afghan journalist)(Brief Article)(Interview)

Last week the United Nations enacted sanctions against Afghanistan's Taliban movement. The United States and Russia led the drive to block travel by and supplies of arms to Taliban members unless the ruling Taliban turned over suspected Islamic terrorist Osama bin Laden to the West. Pakistani writer and journalist Ahmed Rashid's book "Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia" was published last year in the United States. Earlier this month in Lahore, Rashid spoke to NEWSWEEK's Carla Power about the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and the fresh strain of militancy emerging in the Muslim world. Excerpts:

What do you see as the future of Taliban-U.S. relations after the sanctions?

The Taliban are going to defy the United States. They've already done that by showing the pictures of Osama at his son's wedding in Kandahar [last week]. This was after 18 months where we hadn't seen Osama, and a pledge by the Taliban that he would stay under wraps. They've defied Russia and Central Asian states by allowing [Uzbeki militant] Juma Namangani to cross into Tajikistan two weeks ago, and they're encouraging Pakistan's Islamic parties to tell General Musharraf to defy the sanctions. None of this is accidental. The mood is very belligerent.

How would you assess America's bin Laden policy in the context of its broader regional policy?

The U.S. focus on Osama has been so one-dimensional. The network of militancy in Afghanistan is huge, and it's not all Osama-controlled. Militants there include Chinese, Central Asians, Arabs from 12 different countries, Filipinos, Indonesians, Burmese and Pakistanis. This is not simply a problem of one man. It has degenerated into a much bigger, more dangerous pan-Islamic movement. There's another reason it's one-dimensional: the root cause of the Osama problem is the continuing war in Afghanistan. As long as the war continues, Afghanistan will remain a base for Islamic militancy and drug and arms trafficking. The United States has not focused sufficiently on how to end the war. Nor has it put sufficient pressure on the region to stop arms supplies to both the Taliban and [opposition commander Ahmed Shah] Massoud. Catching Osama is the No. 1 item for U.S. foreign policy. Ending the war doesn't even feature on the top 10 of American foreign- policy interests. All we have seen of U.S. policy has been punishment by the stick. What is needed is the carrot, to convince the warlords to end the fighting. You're not offering the warlords or the devastated population anything in terms of reconstruction funding to end the war. Mediation without incentives for peace is utterly useless. U.N. ...