KANDAHAR, Afghanistan?U.S. investigators on Wednesday questioned a man who describes himself as a financial supporter of the Taliban and showed up voluntarily at the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan offering information.
Pentagon officials said the man had given money to the Taliban but had not been a member of the Islamic regime that ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. It was not known what information he has about the complex web of support of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorist network, which was sheltered by the Taliban.
Marine spokesman Lt. James Jarvis said the man showed up Tuesday at the Kandahar airport, where thousands of U.S. troops are based and a detention center holds hundreds of al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
The man remained on the base Wednesday but was not being detained, Jarvis said. A Pentagon official said on condition of anonymity that he was not on the U.S. list of wanted men, but Jarvis said investigators were “jumping with joy.”
At the Pentagon, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the man was being questioned. But Myers would not give details on the man’s identity or say how he came to the base.
U.S. officials initially said the man was an al Qaeda finance official but later Pentagon officials said he was a Taliban backer.
The nature of the man’s purported donations were unclear. However, during the years the Taliban was in power, a major source of income for the Islamic militia purportedly came from kickbacks from big time smugglers, including drug dealers, who were willing to pay in order to be allowed to continue their operations.
Also Wednesday, a Marine color guard saluted as a flag draped coffin holding the remains of the last of seven Marines killed in a crash a week ago was loaded onto a C-17 at Kandahar and flown to Germany en route to Dover Air Force Base. The crash of the refueling plane in Pakistan was the most deadly single incident for U.S. forces in the Afghanistan campaign.
The runway at Kandahar airport was darkened to prevent the C-17 from becoming a target for attackers.
The fourth planeload of detainees in less than a week left Kandahar on Wednesday for a U.S. Navy detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they will be interrogated. There were 30 prisoners aboard the flight; bringing the total flown out to 110 and about 320 remaining at Kandahar.
Ahead of a planned visit to Afghanistan by Secretary of State Colin Powell, a U.S. congressional delegation met Afghan Prime Minister Hamid Karzai in the capital, Kabul, and pledged that American involvement in Afghanistan would not end with the winding down of the conflict.
“While our effort began as a war against terrorism, it continues now as an effort to rebuild this country,” said Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a Democrat from South Dakota and the delegation’s leader.
But another top U.S. congressman said the United States won’t take the lead in rebuilding Afghanistan and urged other countries to “step up to the plate” ahead of a Tokyo aid summit for the war torn nation.
“We carried the bulk of the military load. We are not going to carry the bulk of the reconstruction load,” Democratic Rep. Tom Lantos of California said in Tokyo.
The struggle to restore services in the capital took a step forward with the reopening of Kabul’s international airport, which closed three months ago because of heavy bombing.