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September 26, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- The latest allegations made about Pakistan by Afghan President Karzai focus on Islamabad's failure to close down Pakistan's most radical madrasahs -- the religious boarding schools for poor children where, in the most extreme cases, Islamic militancy is encouraged.

Karzai made the remarks after a speech Monday, September 25, in Washington. He said many madrasahs in both Afghanistan and Pakistan teach violent hatred of those whose beliefs differ from a strict interpretation of Islam.

"Those places have to be closed by action, by arresting the [operators] -- the masters of those madrasahs, the organizers -- by simply closing them down. And I hope President Musharraf and I and those who help us around can address the problem effectively by going and simply closing them."

Karzai raised the issue of extremism within Pakistani madrasahs after President Musharraf told the United Nations General Assembly last week that support for the Taliban in his country comes from some of the millions of Afghan refugees there.

"Problems along the bordering regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan are compounded by the continuing presence in Pakistan of over 3 million Afghan refugees, some of them sympathetic to the Taliban," Musharraf said.

In the week since that UN speech, Karzai has responded to Musharraf's finger pointing by charging that Taliban commanders are now headquartered in the Pakistani city of Quetta -- and that they command Taliban attacks inside Afghanistan from safe havens there.

The escalating argument between Karzai and Musharraf is expected to dominate talks at the White House on Wednesday, September 27, when the two sit down with Bush.

Even as Karzai was meeting with Rumsfeld on Monday, September 25, Musharraf was staking out his position -- which he made public in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Musharraf told that audience that it is not possible for Taliban leaders to have their headquarters in Quetta.

"Quetta is the capital of Baluchistan. Quetta has today a provincial assembly functioning,” Musharraf told his audience. “We have a military corps headquartered there with two divisions there. There is no question that any Taliban headquarters [are] there. This is the most ridiculous statement and it is the most ridiculous that the Taliban headquarters can be in Quetta."

Independent experts on Pakistan disagree. Ahmed Rashid is the Pakistani journalist who documented the rise of the Taliban movement during the 1990s in his book "Taliban."

Rashid tells RFE/RL that allegations about Taliban headquarters in Quetta are not coming from Kabul alone. He says the allegations also have been made privately to Musharraf by NATO and the U.S. military.

"[Musharraf] is now aware and the Pakistanis are aware. They have been informed that both NATO and the U.S. forces in Afghanistan have determined that the Taliban leadership is sitting in Quetta, [Pakistan], and is operating the war from Quetta,” Rashid said. “I think there is now an enormous amount pressure on Musharraf to do something about that."

Karzai also has accused Pakistan of ignoring Afghan intelligence passed on recently to Islamabad -- including the phone numbers and precise locations of Taliban leaders who had used those telephones.

But Musharraf told his New York audience on Monday that the value of the Afghan intelligence was questionable because it was too old. Musharraf said: "Intelligence -- to be effective -- should be immediate. Nobody, no target, sit there waiting for you for three months [saying], 'Come and catch me.' If you give telephone numbers which are three to six months old, this becomes ridiculous. And this is exactly what happened. [Karzai] gave these numbers to me when he came [to Pakistan] with his intelligence boss also sitting on a presidential visit. And he handed over this file to me. Right in front of him I actually was extremely rude to his intelligence boss. I said: 'Is this your sense of intelligence that your were waiting for a presidential visit to hand over this file of numbers to me?'"

The release in the United States on Monday, September 25, of Musharraf's memoirs, "In The Line of Fire," also has given Musharraf a chance to influence the public debate about Pakistan's contribution to the war against terrorism before he sits down with Bush and Karzai in Washington.

In his book, Musharraf concedes that Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants still operate in his country. But he insists that he has no knowledge of the whereabouts of high-profile fugitives like Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.

(By RFE/RL correspondent Ron Synovitz; RFE/RL correspondent Andrew Tully contributed to this report from Washington).