KABUL: Taleban militants yesterday vowed to continue fighting in Afghanistan and ruled out peace talks with President Hamid Karzai’s Western-backed government as long as foreign troops remained in the country.
With no end in sight to the conflict which has now entered its eighth year, Western leaders now admit the war cannot be won militarily and that ultimately peace talks will have to be held to bring an end to fighting that has killed 4,000 people this year.
Saudi Arabia hosted a meeting of pro-government Afghan figures and former Taleban officials last month which analysts say could be a first small step toward more substantial dialogue.
But the Taleban have denied any involvement in the Saudi talks and said news of the meeting was leaked to try to split the movement which has managed to launch more attacks this year and extend its influence to the outskirts of the capital, Kabul.
“It will be impossible for the invader armies to delay the progress of jihad and the stop Muslim Ummah (nation) in Afghanistan,” the Taleban said in a statement on their website.
“The Islamic emirate wants to make it clear that the only solution and the most successful path for resolving the Afghan problem is for foreign forces to leave Afghanistan unconditionally,” it said.
Afghanistan this year has suffered from the worst violence since US-led and Afghan forces toppled the Taleban in late 2001 for refusing to give up Al-Qaeda leaders behind the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
While there is a growing Western realization that the war in Afghanistan will not end in outright victory, analysts say the Taleban are unlikely to enter into serious peace talks while they feel they are gaining ground and sense disarray among their foes. The Taleban were on the “verge of victory,” the insurgents said on their website.
Meanwhile, two foreign nationals, believed to be Westerners, and an Afghan were killed in a shoot-out outside the offices of international courier company DHL in Kabul yesterday, police said. Separately, two Turks and two Bangladeshis were kidnapped in Afghanistan, which this year has seen a spiral in violence that has mostly been blamed on Taleban.
The Kabul incident was the second fatal shooting of a foreign national in the Afghan capital in days, after a British-South African aid worker was gunned down on Monday in a killing claimed by the Taleban.
