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Former diplomats push for immediate talks with Taliban

23 March 2011 22:32 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. An international team of former diplomats called Wednesday on the Obama administration and its Afghan partners to push now for a negotiated settlement with the Taliban, as US-led forces near a peak, APA reports quoting AFP.
A task force led by Thomas Pickering, a former number three at the US State Department, and Lakhdar Brahimi, a former UN special representative for Afghanistan, said Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s US-backed government has as strong a hand as it will get.
In a New York Times column timed with the release of the team’s report, Pickering and Brahimi said Washington "has been holding back from direct negotiations, hoping the ground war will shift decisively in its favor.
"But we believe the best moment to start the process toward reconciliation is now, while (US-led) force levels are near their peak," the pair wrote, nearly 10 years after the United States launched its war in Afghanistan.
The report itself argued that "neither side can expect to vanquish the other militarily in the foreseeable future," as some of its authors, like Lawrence Korb, said the US-led military surge has stopped Taliban momentum.
"This growing sense of stalemate helps to set the stage for the beginning of a political phase to conclude the conflict," according to the report published by its sponsors, The Century Foundation.
Besides the military stalemate, other factors suggest the time is right for negotiations, the task force said.
For one thing, public support is waning within western countries which have contributed troops to Afghanistan. And in Afghanistan, people are weary of the decade-old war.
Meanwhile, the Taliban have met increasing resistance to their efforts to reimpose their puritanical rule on areas beyond their "most dedicated base."
Moreover, because of inflows of international aid, Afghans who live in areas outside Taliban control enjoy far higher standards of living than those who live inside them.
Brahimi, an Algerian who met the Taliban’s spiritual leader Mullam Omar before the September 2001 attacks, and other members of the task force met Taliban leaders whom they found open to the idea of negotiations.
"We think the Taliban will be interested in exploring the possibility of negotiations," Brahimi told a dinner audience late Tuesday before the report’s formal release.
James Dobbins, a task force member and a former US special envoy to Afghanistan, told the same audience that the Taliban had to be pragmatic as "they realize that winning is not so certain as it used to be."
The task force called for finding an international facilitator, "designated through the United Nations," to explore the possibility for negotiations with all the potential parties.
The talks themselves would be highly complex, it said. At one level, they would involve the Karzai government, the Taliban and other players in the country, including Uzbek, Tajik and Hazara leaders.
At another level, they would bring in the United States and Pakistan. Iran, India and neighboring Central Asian states would be involved. Others would include Russia, China, and the European Union as well as Japan and Turkey.
In a major speech on Afghanistan policy on February 18, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the US military surge would split the Taliban from Al-Qaeda, laying the groundwork for a political solution in Afghanistan.
She did not mention a timeline.
The chief US diplomat reaffirmed US plans to start reducing troops in July and complete the drawdown by the end of 2014 as Afghans take charge of their war-torn country.
In October, Karzai inaugurated a peace council appointed to broker peace with the Taliban and other insurgents.