A Pakistan television channel on Sunday broadcast what it said was an audiotape from the leader of Taleban, Mulla Omar, claiming that his fighters still controlled large parts of Afghanistan.
The authenticity of the tape, broadcast by the TV channel, could not be independently verified. The network said it had been sent the voice clip via e-mail from Kabul.
A purported Taleban spokesman quoted by Pakistan-based 'Afghan Islamic Press' (AIP) denied that Omar had issued any new audiotape.
The man, said to be Omar, was purportedly addressing a Taleban military council in the province of Helmand and claimed that his movement still held sway over large parts of Afghanistan. "Losing the capital of Afghanistan does not mean that Taleban have finished," the network's translation quoted him as saying.
Addressing Afghan President Hamid Karzai but not naming him directly, the man said: "If today the American military abandons you, you have no standing. Russia's military also came to Afghanistan - remember its fate."
The man said that Afghanistan was a Muslim country where believers were in a majority and outsiders would never be able to impose their ideology there.
"The rulers of Kabul would not be able to run the country with the wisdom of others and, God willing, they would be destroyed," he said.
The purported spokesman of the movement, Mohammed Hanif, told AIP that the audiotape was not genuine.
"I can tell you for sure that no such new audiocassette has been released," it quoted him as saying. "The cassette attributed to him is therefore wrong."
Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Sunday called fugitive Taleban leader Mullah Omar a coward and denied that the resurgent militia was a threat to his government.
In an interview with CNN television, Karzai also called on Pakistan to step up co-operation in the war on terror. Karzai spoke with the "Late Edition" programme following the release of an audiotape by a Pakistani television channel purported to be Mulla Omar. In it, Omar claimed that Taleban fighters controlled much of Afghanistan and that international forces could not solve Afghanistan's problems.
The Afghan leader said if Omar is "really in charge" then "he should show himself up and face the danger that he is causing to hundreds of people, young people in Afghanistan and in Pakistan and not hide the way he's hiding right now.
"It needs guts to do what he is talking about, and he doesn't have that. He only goes about and sends young people to death." Asked whether he was calling Omar a coward, Karzai said "definitely". "He has no opinions in the sense that I'm sure he is not even aware as to what's going on in Afghanistan. I'm sure he's hidden somewhere in a guest house, wherever he is."