In Pakistan, Albright Puts Focus on Peace

NASIR BAGH REFUGEE CAMP, Pakistan — Secretary of State Madeleine Albright flew Tuesday to this Afghan refugee camp of dusty streets and mud-brick huts less than 30 miles from the Afghan border to wave the American flag. But in stark contrast to the U.S. military focus here in the 1970s and 1980s, she visited a girls school where she urged the youngsters to achieve.

She exchanged tales with them of refugee life, hers as a Czech child fleeing the Nazis and the girls' flight from Soviet occupation.

Albright then watched a demonstration of land mine removal by dogs and humans, part of a program to clear more than 10 million of the deadly devices that still litter the Afghan countryside.

This first visit by an American secretary of State to South Asia in 14 years reflected one of the most significant shifts in U.S. foreign policy after the Cold War's end. Her message was that the United States is returning to the subcontinent not to influence its conflicts or to provide arms to assorted combatants but to talk peace, women's rights, energy and the environment. Instead of offering Stinger antiaircraft missiles, as had happened during the Afghan War, the United States this time brought schoolbooks, crayons, watercolors, chalk and an atlas autographed by Albright.

The secretary of State carried a persistent message at this front-line camp of 80,000, one of 350 "refugee villages" that are still home to 1.2 million Afghans in Pakistan. She made the point in her earlier talks with Pakistani officials.

While her predecessors raged at the Soviets for their invasion of this mountainous region, she railed at the Taliban, the radical Islamic faction that controls two-thirds of strife-weary Afghanistan, for its treatment of women and children.

"We are opposed to the Taliban because of their approach to human rights, their despicable treatment of women and children and their general lack of respect for human dignity in a way that is more reminiscent of the past than the future," she said at a morning news conference in Islamabad, the capital, with Pakistani Foreign Minister Gohar Ayub Khan.

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In the afternoon here, before refugee women and girls shrouded in white burka head covers, she blasted the Taliban's denial of education, health care and employment to females as "harsh and backward." Her words were some of the toughest language ever used publicly by the U.S. about the Taliban.