Pakistan sends warning to Taliban

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Pakistan declared Tuesday that Afghanistan's Taliban rulers "don't have much time" to stave off U.S.-led military strikes, the clearest signal yet that the Pakistani government is washing its hands of the Taliban's fate.\n"Pakistan has conveyed to the Taliban what the situation is, what are the dangers, what the international community is expecting them to do," Foreign Ministry spokesman Riaz Mohammed Khan said. "We have told them they don't have much time."\nComing from a country that was once the closest ally of Afghanistan's harshly Islamic rulers -- and which has now pledged itself as a U.S. partner -- the warning carried the weight of finality.\nKhan spoke to reporters after U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin briefed Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, on the status of the investigation into the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, which Washington blames on Saudi exile Osama bin Laden.\nThe Taliban refusal to hand over bin Laden and his al-Qaida lieutenants has brought Afghanistan to the brink of armed confrontation with the United States.\nKhan said that despite Chamberlin's briefing, Pakistan has still not been presented with definitive proof that al-Qaida was behind the suicide hijackings Sept. 11.\nHowever, NATO Secretary-General George Robertson said Tuesday the United States had provided the alliance with "conclusive" proof of bin Laden's involvement.\nAsked about that assertion, Khan replied: "We are not part of NATO."\nNevertheless, probably no other country has tried as hard as Pakistan to talk the Taliban off their collision course with the world's greatest power.\nIf war comes, Pakistan will almost certainly pay a price: a flareup of militant sentiment that the government has been at pains to check.\n"Afghanistan will be America's graveyard," about 5,000 pro-Taliban protesters chanted in the Pakistani frontier city of Quetta. Across the border in Kandahar, the Taliban's home base, Afghan crowds screamed "Death to America!" and burned effigies of President Bush.\nThe Taliban's leaders have repeatedly said they are not afraid of American military action, and the rally in Kandahar, the southern city where the Taliban movement was formed, sent a new message of defiance.