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U.N. Mission Chief Met Taliban Officials

29 January 2010 21:50 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. The United Nations’ top representative to Afghanistan met with Taliban officials earlier this month, amid heightened efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the eight-year-old conflict, a U.N. official said, APA reports quoting The Wall Street Journal.
Diplomats declined to say how senior the Taliban officials were, however, and said the overture by Kai Eide, who steps down as the U.N.’s envoy to Afghanistan in March, appears to have been his alone.
The West has been pushing Afghan President Hamid Karzai to help build a comprehensive plan to persuade Taliban fighters to lay down their arms. But the Afghan government and its various sponsors have sometimes been at odds over how to pursue reconciliation.
U.S. officials don’t want to appear too eager to pursue a deal, and say Islamist leaders will likely be more compliant if a troop surge this year reverses recent gains by Taliban militants.
Mr. Eide, head of the U.N.’s mission to Afghanistan since March 2008, has criticized the coalition policy towards Afghanistan as overly militarized. He has had a testy relationship with Washington’s point man on Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, according to U.S. officials.
Senior U.S. officials said they were given no advance notice of Mr. Eide’s meeting with Taliban representatives. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said her staff had been briefed on Mr. Eide’s meeting only afterwards, and she didn’t indicate American support for the dialogue.
"He wanted to test for himself and get his own conclusion about the mindset of some of the Taliban members," Mrs. Clinton said Friday, en route to Paris. Mr. Eide, she added, "is not going to be part of our efforts going forward."
Mrs. Clinton said Mr. Eide wanted to get a reading on the Taliban leadership before international backers of the Afghan government converged in London for a conference Thursday. At the conference, "I think he wanted to offer his personal views about what he assessed," she said.
The U.S. State Department says it supports efforts to "rehabilitate" Taliban members. Still, Washington says it doesn’t seek to reconcile with militants tied to al Qaeda and international terrorism.
Mr. Eide stressed the importance of political reconciliation in Afghanistan during press appearances at the London conference. He didn’t, however, outline his own meeting with the Taliban earlier this month.
Attempts to reach Mr. Eide were unsuccessful Friday. Mr. Eide "will never comment on any meeting of this sort," said Dan McNorton, spokesman for the U.N. in Kabul. "It is the Afghanistan government who are and will lead all efforts to bring peace and stability to this country. As always, the U.N. stands ready to assist in this process in any way that we can."
The Reuters news agency first reported Mr. Eide’s meeting with the Taliban. The agency reported that the meeting took place earlier this month, after Mr. Eide gave his final address to the U.N. Security Council on Jan. 6 in New York.
In his address, Mr. Eide blasted the Obama administration’s Afghan policy, warning that an excessive reliance on a military solution risked failure in Afghanistan. He called for increased investment in Afghanistan’s civilian institutions, its military and its economy.
Mr. Eide has had a tumultuous tenure as the U.N.’s special representative to Afghanistan. Last summer, he clashed with his deputy, U.S. diplomat Peter Galbraith, over the U.N.’s handling of the Afghan presidential elections. Mr. Galbraith accused Mr. Eide of being too easy on the Afghan president.
Mr. Karzai has at times appeared testy towards Western overtures to the Taliban. At the summit in London this week he called on Saudi Arabia to take a lead role in the peace process.
Some Western diplomats say Mr. Karzai’s faith in the Saudis is misplaced, and that the kingdom has little influence over the Quetta Shura, the overall Taliban leadership council headed by Mullah Omar, which U.S. officials say is based in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan.
A U.N. official close to the matter said the U.N. informed Mr. Karzai of Mr. Eide’s meeting with Taliban officials. Still, word of the meeting wasn’t widespread, even within the Afghan government.