Marine Killed In Afghanistan

A U.S. Marine and an Afghan soldier were killed during battles with militants in eastern Afghanistan, the U.S. military said Friday.

Four other Afghan soldiers were wounded in Thursday's clash in Kunar province. The forces were conducting operations ahead of next month's legislative elections, which Taliban militants have vowed to disrupt.

Two U.S. soldiers also were killed Thursday when a homemade bomb hit an American convoy supporting crews improving a road from the main southern city of Kandahar to outlying mountains. Two other soldiers were wounded, the military said in a statement.

A surge of violence since winter has killed about 1,000 people in Afghanistan — 60 American soldiers among them. Militants have stepped up assaults in the south and east trying to sabotage the U.S.-backed recovery, while U.S. and Afghan troops answer with their own offensives.

President Hamid Karzai hailed next month's parliamentary elections as a landmark in Afghanistan's history as the country marked the 86th anniversary of its independence from British rule on Friday.

Addressing a rally at Kabul's national stadium attended by his Cabinet and hundreds of ordinary Afghans, Karzai said citizens had a chance to elect representatives to parliament after "years of war and disaster," in what will be the culmination of its democratic transition after the fall of the Taliban in late 2001.

"The elections are important for the Afghanistan of today and tomorrow," Karzai said, speaking in Dari language and then Pashto. "We are going to have a new life."

On Sept. 18, Afghans will vote for a new national legislature and new provincial assemblies. Taliban-led rebels who have maintained a stubborn insurgency for nearly four years despite the presence of thousands of U.S.-led forces, have threatened to sabotage the elections, and have stepped up attacks in the past six months.

Karzai decried "terrorists" whom he accused of killing innocent people, such as elders, doctors, engineers and clerics, and of attacking hospitals, bridges and roads. He branded them "enemies of Afghanistan's development."

Karzai, who won a five-year term in presidential elections last year, urged candidates to recognize their responsibility "to God and to Afghan history" by acting legally and not abusing power. He urged Afghans to select representatives with a love of their nation and religion who would work for peace and stability.

Afghanistan's Independence Day marks its liberation from Britain in 1919 after the Third Anglo-Afghan War.

The United States was "not out to destroy the Taliban," a U.S. diplomat told the regime just a year before a U.S.-led invasion toppled Afghanistan's Taliban government that had harbored al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.

U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan William B. Milam held a secret meeting with an unidentified senior Taliban official in September 2000 and assured him that international sanctions on the Taliban would end if bin Laden were expelled from Afghanistan, newly declassified documents show.

"The ambassador added that the U.S. was not against the Taliban, per se," and "was not out to destroy the Taliban," Milam wrote in a secret cable to Washington, recounting his meeting.

A declassified version of the cable was released Thursday, obtained by George Washington University's National Security Archive under the Freedom of Information Act.

Milam told the Taliban official — whose name is excised from the declassified document — that bin Laden was the main impediment to better relations between the Taliban and the United States.

"If the U.S. and the Taliban could get past bin Laden, we would have a different kind of relationship," Milam said he told the official.

At the time, a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, Washington had no formal diplomatic relations with Afghanistan because of human rights and other abuses by the militant Islamic Taliban regime.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the Bush administration had no comment on the meeting, which occurred before President Bush took office.

In his 2000 diplomatic cable, Milam told his bosses the Taliban official had adopted a "far less obstreperous" tone than usually heard from the Taliban, and suggested the United States do some small favor for Afghanistan to show good will.

The meeting in Islamabad, Pakistan, produced no promise from the Taliban to turn over bin Laden, and it is not clear from the material released Thursday what the Clinton administration did next.