KABUL, 16 January 2005 — Hundreds of Taleban fighters may abandon their insurgency in Afghanistan as a result of peace talks under way between local commanders and President Hamid Karzai’s government, a provincial governor said yesterday. Three years after US-led forces ousted the Taleban from power for harboring Al-Qaeda, Karzai and his US backers hope to coax lower-level Taleban fighters back to normal life, leaving senior commanders and Al-Qaeda leaders isolated.
Tribal chiefs are acting as intermediaries between the Taleban and Karzai’s government in the southeastern provinces of Paktia, Khost and Paktika, said Paktia governor Assadullah Wafa. “We have more than hundreds of Taleban who want to return to their normal lives,” Wafa told Reuters.
In return, the tribal chiefs and local officials want the US ambassador in Kabul, Zalmay Khalilzad, to urge US forces not to harass Taleban members who quit the insurgency, he said. “The government is talking to them through tribal chiefs and we are demanding Khalilzad use his influence and propose to the American military not to detain or harass those Taleban who plan to stop fighting the government,” Wafa said.
But a government official said only those Taleban fighters who had not committed any crimes would be eligible for amnesty. “Those Taleban whose hands are not stained in blood are welcome,” said Khaliq Ahmad, of Karzai’s office. But asked how many militants that might be, he said: “Not more than 100.”
Senior Taleban commander Mulla Dadullah said the militants were holding no negotiations with either the Afghan or the US government. “This is a part of their strategy ... to spread rumors and try to divide and weaken their enemy,” he told Reuters by satellite telephone. “But we will continue our struggle till the time when there is not a single foreign soldier on Afghan soil.”
Leaders of mainstream opposition parties fear Karzai, an ethnic Pushtun, wants to use the amnesty to strengthen his power base in the Pushtun and former Taleban heartlands in the south and southeast ahead of parliamentary elections due in April.
Wafa declined to identify any of the Taleban he said were willing to stop fighting, but said the group that he was in contact with consisted of both senior and ordinary members of the radical Islamic movement. US-led troops overthrew the Taleban government in late 2001 after it refused to hand over Al-Qaeda’s leader Osama Bin Laden, the architect of the Sept. 11 attacks on US cities.
The Taleban and their Islamic allies are mostly active in the southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan near the rugged tribal areas along the Pakistan border. Nearly 1,100 people including civilians, militants, aid workers, and foreign and Afghan troops have been killed in those regions since August 2003, mostly in Taleban-linked raids.
But militant activities have dropped off since Karzai was picked as the first directly elected president in October’s elections and also because of the harsh Afghan winter.
Earlier on Friday, NATO’s top military commander voiced confidence over plans to expand the alliance-led peacekeeping mission into western Afghanistan, saying it could happen within the next few months. More generally US Gen. James Jones said the threat level in the war-scarred country in general was decreasing.
NATO said this week it expects to make a “milestone” decision next month on expanding the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) into western Afghanistan. The alliance’s defense ministers meet in Nice on Feb. 9-10. ISAF was initially confined to Kabul, but last year expanded into the north. Officials concede it is behind schedule on plans to move into the west, which are part of a strategy which will ultimately see it in the south and east too, as well as possibly merging with the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom.
