More high-level Taliban interested in talks: Holbrooke

WASHINGTON: High-level Taliban leaders are showing interest in talks with the US-backed government in Kabul in increasing numbers, as pressure mounts from an intensifying Nato military campaign, a special US envoy said on Sunday.

But Richard Holbrooke, the administration’s envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, cautioned that the feelers so far add up to “contacts and discussions” rather than peace negotiations to end a war now in its tenth year.

“What we’ve got here is an increasing number of Taliban at high levels saying, ‘Hey, we want to talk,’” he said. “We think this is a result in large part of the growing pressure they’re under from General (David) Petraeus and the ISAF command.”

Holbrooke’s comments in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria were the latest sign that Washington is encouraging Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s peace overtures toward the Taliban as it looks to begin drawing down a US surge force next year.

The New York Times reported last week that Taliban leaders were being offered safe passage by Nato troops from their sanctuaries in Pakistan, and in one case were flown to Kabul in a Nato aircraft.

Some commentators have seen the turn as part of a “fight and talk” strategy by Petraeus, the Isaf commander, who has escalated drone attacks in Taliban sanctuaries while using his surge forces to weaken insurgent strongholds in the south.

Holbrooke, a veteran of war-ending peace negotiations in other conflicts, cautioned not to expect the war in Afghanistan to be settled by formal peace negotiations as they were in Vietnam or Bosnia.

“In this particular case, unlike the two issues I mentioned a moment ago, there is no clear single address that you go to. “There’s no Ho Chi Minh. There’s no Slobodan Milosevic. There’s no Palestinian Authority. There is a widely dispersed group of people that we roughly call the enemy,” he said.

The list of groups includes the Afghan Taliban led by Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Pakistani Taliban, the Haqqani network, Hezb-i-Islami, Lashkar-e-Taiba and al Qaeda.

The only group Holbrooke specifically ruled out talks with was al Qaeda. “So the idea of peace talks, to use your phrase, or negotiations, to use another phrase, doesn’t really add up to the way this thing is going to evolve,” Holbrooke said.

But, he said, the war could not be won militarily and “some kind of political element to this is essential, and we are looking at every aspect of this.”

Published in The Express Tribune, October 25^th, 2010.

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�����litant groups while MI5, the British secret service, is hunting a cell of terrorists connected to an al Qaeda commander who boasted of attacks in Europe. It is investigating a network connected to Ilyas Kashmiri, a senior al Qaeda commander who sparked an alert over commando-style attacks in Europe and had also threatened the recently-concluded Commonwealth Games.

Express Tribune sources in the restive North Waziristan agency, a region where Kashmiri’s Harkat Jihad-e-Islami (HJeI) is based, had also confirmed the presence of at least two Britons of Pakistani origin who were among several being trained. One of them reportedly died in a strike by US-operated drone recently however his death was denied by Taliban associates.

These claims are impossible to verify and the exact number of Europeans being trained there is also a mystery. According to Taliban claims, there are over 200 trainees but independent sources put the figure at a few dozen.

A spokesperson for the British high commission in Islamabad also confirmed that counter-terrorism is one of the subjects to be discussed in the meetings. “The meetings will cover many issues, including British assistance for Pakistan to overcome flood losses, counter-terrorism, immigration and problems women are faced with here,” spokesperson George Sherriff told The Express Tribune.

Published in The Express Tribune,October 25^th, 2010.