Taliban peace talks have failed: ex-Afghan minister

Atmar says the strategy would continue to fail unless Pakistan reversed its policy of giving sanctuary to insurgents.

WASHINGTON: Afghanistan's former interior minister on Thursday said efforts to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table had failed and warned that those who have renounced violence were not the main threat.

"I don't have any evidence that this has happened," Mohammad Haneef Atmar told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank in Washington, alluding to whether peace talks had produced results.

"Of around 30,000 insurgents, only eight percent have reconciled so far -- and 99 percent of them are not from the south," he said, referring to Afghanistan's most violent region and the Taliban's spiritual homeland.

"Frankly speaking, it does not work. The eight percent that are reconciled, most of them are not genuine insurgents, particularly not from the regions that matter."

Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former president of Afghanistan who had been given the Herculean task of seeking peace with the Taliban, was assassinated in Kabul on September 20 by a suicide bomber wearing explosives in his turban.

The bomber had claimed to be a peace emissary from the Taliban leadership, whom Afghan authorities blamed for the attack. After the killing, President Hamid Karzai said the country would review how to advance the peace process.

But Atmar, interior minister between 2008 and 2010 and who personally held talks with Taliban leaders during that time, said the strategy would continue to fail unless Pakistan reversed its policy of giving sanctuary to insurgents.

He also said that many leaders of the Afghan Taliban had placed their families in Pakistan because they believed they were safer there.

The United States has increasingly been looking for a negotiated end to the Afghan conflict given that the insurgency remains virulent more than 10 years after the September 11 attacks prompted American forces to invade the country.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last month urged Pakistan to take action within "days and weeks" on dismantling Afghan militant havens and encouraging the Taliban into peace talks.