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Musharraf: Taliban gaining powerPakistan's president calls on Afghanistan to take actionFrom Syed Mohsin Naqvi SPECIAL REPORTYOUR E-MAIL ALERTSLAHORE, Pakistan (CNN) -- Fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar remained in control of his Afghan Islamic militia, which was gaining strength in the south of the country, Pakistan's president said Thursday. General Pervez Musharraf said the growing strength of the Taliban, which ruled most of Afghanistan from 1996 until the U.S.-led invasion that followed al Qaeda's 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, was having negative effects in Pakistan. He demanded that Afghanistan's government take immediate steps to stop the infiltration of fighters across the border, warning that the spread of violence could threaten Pakistan. In contrast, he said, the leadership of the al Qaeda terrorist network, which the Taliban allowed to operate from its territory before the invasion, was on the run and weak. Omar, along with al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, escaped U.S. forces when the Taliban fell in December 2001. But U.S. and allied troops continue to battle Taliban fighters in southern and eastern Afghanistan, and Pakistan's efforts to crack down on Islamic militants along the border has provoked resistance to government troops in the tribal regions of northwest Pakistan. "Mullah Omar is leading the Taliban, and they are getting stronger in southern Afghanistan," Musharraf told Pakistanis in a nationally televised address Thursday. Pakistan had backed the Taliban in the late 1990s as it extended its control across a country wracked by a decade and a half of fighting against Soviet occupiers and between rival warlords. But after al Qaeda's suicide hijackings killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States, Musharraf sided with Washington in its military response, allowing U.S. warplanes to cross Pakistani airspace to attack Afghanistan. Pakistan announced in June that it would move an additional 10,000 troops to its northwest frontier to crack down on cross-border infiltration amid a new wave of fighting in Afghanistan. The deployment was part of a broader effort to encourage economic development in the area, where the Islamabad government historically held little influence, Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri said. Kasuri said about 650 Pakistani troops had been killed in clashes with militants at that time, and he urged Afghanistan's Western-backed government to share information directly with Pakistani intelligence rather than pass it through U.S. intelligence. The opposition Pakistan People's Party dismissed Musharraf's speech, calling it "a failed bid to hoodwink the people" and divert blame from economic problems since he took power in a 1999 coup. "General Musharraf's prescription that a nation's strength lay in its military muscle is fundamentally flawed," the party said in a statement issued after the speech. "National security is not enhanced by matching gun for a gun and tank for tank, but by social cohesion, economic development and national integrity, all of which had been gravely undermined during the military regime of Musharraf." Musharraf also repeated his condemnation of last week's bombings in the Indian city of Mumbai, which killed nearly 200 people. He vowed that Pakistan would continue fighting terrorism and offered full cooperation with Indian authorities investigating the attacks. But he also criticized India for delaying peace talks between south Asia's nuclear-armed rivals, calling the decision a victory for terrorists. 
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