Pak Taliban urge rejection of foreign aid

Pakistan's Taliban have denounced all foreign aid for victims of the country's catastrophic flooding, and said they can match the latest US pledge of 20 million dollars.
"We condemn American and other foreign aid and believe that it will lead to subjugation. Our jihad against America will continue," a spokesman for the group, Azam Tariq, told AFP by telephone.
"The government should not accept American aid and if it happens, we can give 20 million dollars to them as aid for the flood victims," he said.
Meanwhile, the UN aid envoy to flood-stricken Pakistan warned yesterday that armed militants could take advantage of the country's worst humanitarian disaster by operating among its displaced victims.
"We all hope that militants will not take advantage of the circumstances to score points" by exploiting people driven from their homes by the floods, Jean-Maurice Ripert, the United Nations' aid envoy for Pakistan, told Le Monde.
"The people's misery can always be exploited by those who have political or militant aims," the newspaper quoted him as saying, describing the floods as "the worst natural disaster the country has known."
His comment came in response to a question about reports that some local aid groups working for the victims in Pakistan had links to extremists.
The floods have been most devastating in the Taliban's stronghold in the northwest. Across Pakistan they have left six million people dependent on humanitarian help for their survival, the United Nations said.
The United States announced Tuesday it would increase its flood aid by another 20 million dollars to 55 million dollars, while the UN said it would launch an international appeal for several hundred million dollars.
The world body believes 1,600 people have died in the floods while the Pakistani government has confirmed 1,243 deaths.
US aid so far has included 436,000 halal meals and 12 pre-fabricated bridges, while the White House said that US helicopters had helped to save more than 1,000 lives in Pakistan.
But critics say that as the worst floods in living memory spread across Pakistan, the official relief effort has been woefully slow, and Islamic charities have been stepping into the breach.
Pakistan's Tehreek-e-Taliban faction is a key architect of extremist violence that has killed more than 3,570 people across Pakistan in three years.
However Daniel Feldman, a senior State Department official working on Afghanistan and Pakistan, on Tuesday dismissed reports of extremist groups providing aid to needy Pakistanis as "quite overblown".
Referring to US efforts to win public support in a country where anti-American feeling runs high, Ward said the US government tries to "brand as much as possible" of its aid.