1.
TALIBAN COMMANDERS IN TALKS WITH U.N. ENVOY
Reuters
January 28, 2010
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60R6BU20100128
LONDON -- Members of the Taliban's leadership council have met secretly with the United Nations representative for Afghanistan to discuss the possibility of laying down their arms, a U.N. official said on Thursday.
The regional commanders from the Taliban's Quetta Shura requested the meeting with U.N. Special Representative Kai Eide and it took place on January 8 in Dubai, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The official told Reuters it was the first time such talks had taken place with members of the Taliban's top leadership council, which U.S. officials say is based in the Pakistani city of Quetta.
"They requested a meeting to talk about talks. They want protection, to be able to come out in public. They don't want to vanish into places like Bagram," the official said, referring to a detention center at the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan.
Eide declined to comment on whether or not the talks took place.
The Dubai meeting was at a higher level than previously known talks which took place in Saudi Arabia between former Taliban officials and representatives of the Afghan government in 2008.
A regional analyst who followed the Saudi talks closely said the Dubai meeting appeared a significantly more important contact between the Taliban and international community.
The U.N. official said there had been no follow-up on the talks yet, but added: "We've had the initial approach and we are hoping that the Afghan government will now follow up and capitalize on it."
The Afghan government invited Taliban insurgents on Thursday to a peace council of elders as part of efforts to find a way out of a conflict which is trying the patience and resources of Afghanistan's Western allies.
(Reporting by David Brunnstrom; editing by David Stamp)
2.
World news
Hamid Karzai
U.N.-TALIBAN PEACE TALKS SPUR KARZAI TO ACTION
By Julian Borger and Ian Black
** 'Red lines' remain, but proposals from the Afghan president show he is ready to reach out to his disenchanted brothers **
Guardian (London)
January 28, 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/28/afghanistan-un-peace-talks-taliban
The revelation that the U.N. had held exploratory peace talks with Taliban commanders three weeks ago raised new hopes of a negotiated settlement to Afghanistan's gruelling insurgency.
The news came at the end of a conference in London at which the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, sketched out a peace process with the full backing of the West.
"The solution to a war is always to talk to your enemies, unless one party triumphs," the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said. "That is not the case here."
Days earlier, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, also signalled his belief that four years of hard combat with the Taliban would ultimately be ended by a political deal.
"As a soldier, my personal feeling is that there's been enough fighting," he told the *Financial Times*. The sentiment was echoed last night by the U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.
However, obstacles remain. The Afghan government and its Western backers still retain "red lines" they say are non-negotiable: severing of ties with al-Qaida, and acceptance of basic human rights, including women's rights.
Opening the conference, President Karzai said: "We must reach out to all of our countrymen, especially our disenchanted brothers who are not part of al-Qaida or other terrorist networks, who accept the Afghan constitution."
Those conditions are likely to be too much for the head of the Taliban's Quetta Shura leadership council, Mullah Omar, who is widely seen as "irreconcilable." The longstanding goal of NATO strategy in Afghanistan has been to peel away any of his lieutenants who are thought to oppose his pact with Osama bin Laden, and believe the Taliban has paid too high a price for it.
The fact that some Taliban regional commanders sought out Kai Eide, the U.N.'s special representative in Afghanistan, to sound him out on guarantees of safety if they laid down their arms, raises hopes in the NATO camp that its plan to demoralize the Taliban with nearly 40,000 reinforcements and a show of unity, could be paying dividends.
The optimism was hedged with caution. NATO's generals in Afghanistan believe most Taliban still believe they are going to win.
"Our surge has not had yet had an impact on them," a senior NATO officer said. "They are still absolutely confident."
Most Western officials argue that genuine peace talks with the Taliban will only be feasible once the movement has been weakened by the NATO military surge and by reintegration efforts aimed at luring insurgents away with jobs and community development projects.
However, Eide told journalists that lower-level reintegration and reconciliation talks with the Taliban leadership should take place in tandem.
"The reintegration process is important, but it has to be accompanied by political reconciliation" the U.N. envoy said at the end of the London conference.
He pointedly referred to detainees in U.S.-run detention centers at Bagram airport, outside Kabul, whose cases he said had to re-examined.
"That means going through the list of detainees . . . to take out people who need not be there," he said.
According to an account by Reuters news agency of the meeting held in Dubai in January, the Taliban delegates had specifically raised their fears of "disappearing" into CIA-run "black sites" at Bagram.
The Karzai peace plan, unveiled for delegates from more than 60 countries at today's conference, involves creating a national peace council, to oversee the reintegration of the Taliban rank and file, some 75% of whom are thought to fight within a few miles of their village, for principally local reasons.
For their commanders, Karzai offered the prospect of reconciliation, a process which would be brokered with the help of the Saudi monarchy.
As a first step, a grand peace council, or Loya Jirga, would be convened "in the next few weeks," the foreign minister, Rangeen Dadfar Spanta, said.
It would be open to tribal elders from across the country, including those tribes that took no part in the 2001 Bonn peace conference because of their links with the Taliban.
They were thus excluded from the post-Taliban Afghan state -- a decision European and U.S. officials now concede was a serious mistake.
In what was seen as a "sweetener" for a future peace deal, Karzai asked the U.N. to remove from a sanctions list the names of five former Taliban officials who had left the movement.
Asked about his government's role as a peace broker, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, said his country would only talk to the Taliban only if they severed ties with al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden.
"Saudi Arabi has no connection with the Taliban," he said. "We cut connections ages ago, when they started to give sanctuary to Bin Laden, and we haven't renewed them."
3.
Top stories
TALIBAN REJECT LONDON CONFERENCE
By our correspondent
International News (Pakistan)
January 29, 2010
http://www.thenews.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=26946
PESHAWAR -- Terming the London conference as far removed from the ground realities in Afghanistan, the Taliban central leadership on Thursday argued that the U.S. and its allies should have freed all prisoners from jails in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere, removed the names of all Taliban members from the U.N. ‘blacklist,’ and refrained from sending more troops if they really meant to take the proper steps for ending the Afghan conflict.
The long statement by the Leadership Council of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in Pashto was sent to media organizations. Its English translation also became available later on the Taliban website. It said those jailed should not have been kept in prisons for so many years against all principles and in violation of human rights.
The statement argued that the ‘Mujahideen’ were not fighting for money or to grab power. Describing as baseless that most Taliban fighters were not ideologically committed, it claimed that nobody compelled the ‘Mujahideen’ to take up arms and fight the invaders.
“Had the aim of the Mujahideen of the Islamic Emirate been obtainment of material goals, they would have accepted dominance of the invaders in the first place and would have supported them. Everything was in their hand -- comfortable life, money, and power.
“But the Islamic Emirate will never trade on the matter of faith, conscience, soil, and the homeland for material benefits or be coerced and tempted as a result of intimidation and personal privileges. Such [a] wicked game doesn’t fit into the history of the honor-loving people of Afghanistan,” the statement stressed.
Accusing President Obama and Prime Minister Brown of trying to deceive their people by organizing conferences on Afghanistan like the one in London to win public support for a failed war, the statement reminded that such conferences did not work in the past and would not succeed this time as well.
It accused the U.S. and its allies of pursuing a military solution of the Afghan conflict by sending more troops to Afghanistan and trying to buy the loyalties of the Taliban. “The Mujahideen of the Islamic Emirate are the sons of this land; they know every peak and gorge of this country and are ready for its defense. The final defeat and infamy will be the fate of the invaders,” it said.
Arguing that the only solution of the conflict was the withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan, the Taliban statement also tried to reassure the West and rest of the world about their future plans in case they returned to power.
It said: “The leader of the faithful, Mulla Mohammad Omar (May Allah protect him), has clearly said that we want an Islamic rule in our country. We do not intend to harm neighboring countries and other countries of the world. We don’t want to harm us. We will not allow our soil to be used against any other country.
“The Islamic Emirate wants to have good and positive relations with the neighboring countries in an atmosphere of mutual respect and take far-reaching steps for bilateral cooperation, economic development, and [a] prosperous future.
“We want others to reciprocate our gesture by similar intentions. The Islamic Emirate is committed to take measures for the fulfilment of our countrymen’s educational needs in the light of the fundamentals of Islam and the requirements of the contemporary world.”
4.
Geopolitical diary
MOVING TOWARD A GLOBAL AFGHAN TALIBAN SETTLEMENT
Stratfor
January 25, 2010
http://www.stratfor.com/node/152902/geopolitical_diary/20100125_moving_toward_global_afghan_taliban_settlement
January 25, 2010, will be remembered as the day when much of the planet buzzed about diplomatic talks with Afghanistan’s Taliban movement. The chatter comes in the context of a number of conferences that will be held over the course of the next week that focus on dealing with Afghanistan’s jihadist insurgency. The countries being represented at the meetings -- including the United States, the Central Asian states, Europe, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, India, and China -- have a stake in what happens in Afghanistan.
Each of these players has a different view on how to engage the Taliban in a negotiation process, but there seems to be an emerging consensus that when all is said and done, the Afghan jihadist movement --- in one form or another --- will be part of the government in Kabul. In other words, there is a general acceptance that if Afghanistan is to be settled, the Taliban have to be dealt with as legitimate political stakeholders. The difference lies in the degree to which the Taliban can be accepted.
From the point of view of the United States and its NATO allies, ideally the surge should be able to weaken the momentum of the Taliban and the overall counterinsurgency that divides them. This would result in a significant number of pragmatic elements being stripped from the core that surrounds Mullah Omar and other leaders. The United States and its Western allies are not, however, naive enough to believe that this can be achieved in the short span of time laid out in U.S. President Barack Obama’s Afghanistan strategy. Therefore, the West could learn to live with the hard-line Taliban as long as it can separate itself from al Qaeda, though there is still the matter of how the Obama administration will be able to sell this on the home front, especially in such a dicey political climate.
Pakistan, the second most important player when it comes to dealing with the Taliban (given Islamabad’s historic ties to the Afghan jihadists), would ideally like to see the Taliban gain a large share of the political pie in Kabul. Such an outcome could allow Islamabad to reverse the loss of its influence in Afghanistan and use a more Pakistan-friendly regime as a lever to deal with its security dilemma with India. That said, a political comeback of the Taliban in Afghanistan would also bring significant security threats to the Pakistani state, given Islamabad’s own indigenous Taliban insurgency and the complexities that exist between the two.
Though it does not share a direct border with Afghanistan, India is the one country that seems completely opposed to accommodating the Taliban. New Delhi does not want to see the influence it has gained over the past eight years eroded. More importantly, it does not want Pakistan to get a breather in Afghanistan such that it can focus on the Kashmir issue. From India’s point of view, an Afghan Taliban political revival could boost the regional anti-India Islamist militant landscape.
Iran, the other major power that shares a border with Afghanistan and has deep ethnolinguistic, sectarian, cultural and political ties with its eastern neighbor, has a complex strategy in relation to the Taliban. It is in Tehran’s interest to back certain elements of the Afghan Taliban as doing so keeps the United States occupied -- at least in the short term -- with the war in Afghanistan. This keeps it from taking aggressive action against the Islamic Republic over the nuclear issue. In the long run though, the radical Persian Shia are ideological enemies of the militant Pashtun Sunni movement and would want to see them boxed in as per any negotiated settlement. The Iranians will play a role in any such outcome, particularly through its proxies among the non-Pashtun minorities. Iran also does not want to see its main regional rival Saudi Arabia make gains in Afghanistan, given Riyadh’s historical relations to the Taliban and Pakistan.
Conversely, for the Saudis, there is no turning back the clock in Iraq where an Iranian-leaning, Shia-dominated state has emerged. The Saudis are also seeing how Iran has made deep inroads to its north in Lebanon and south in Yemen, and has potential proxies within the Shia populations in the oil-rich Persian Gulf Arab states. The rise of the Taliban, which has religious as well as ideological ties to the Saudis, could serve as a key means of countering Iranian moves against the oil-rich kingdom.
Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, the three Central Asian states that share borders with Afghanistan, have ties to their respective co-ethnic brethren in Afghanistan, and deep security concerns about a government with a Taliban presence. The Taliban, during their first stint in power, provided sanctuary to Islamist rebels from all across the steppes of Central Asia. Therefore, they are relying on the U.S.-led international process to make sure that a resurgent Taliban can be kept in check.
These Central Asian states also have to contend with the reality that Russia, which enjoys a monopoly of influence in the region, has an interest in the Taliban insurgency remaining a thorn in the side of the United States, at least long enough to make it difficult for Washington to extricate itself. As long as the United States remains bogged down in Afghanistan and other parts of the Islamic world, Russia has the freedom to effect its own geopolitical revival in the former Soviet Union. The Central Asian republics, however, do take comfort from the fact that in the long term, Russia sees the Taliban as a security threat to its Central Asian sphere of influence as well as the Caucasus.
China’s position is similar to that of the Central Asian states. The Chinese fear that a legal Taliban presence in Afghanistan could help Uighur/East Turkestani Islamist militants with ties to Central Asian militants threaten the stability of their own Muslim northwest. But the Chinese have close ties to the Pakistanis and therefore will be working on both fronts to ensure that any Taliban political resurgence in Afghanistan is constrained.
Finally, there is Turkey, which has no physical links to the region but is using its influence with the United States, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and, more recently, Iran to bring the various pieces of the Taliban juggernaut toward some settlement. Turkey under the Justice and Development Party is trying to insert itself as mediator in various conflicts within the Islamic world --- a move endorsed by the United States, which needs all the help it can get. In this case, the Turkish government is using its deep ties to Afghanistan and Pakistan to connect the United States and NATO with the Taliban. This, coupled with Turkey’s ethnic ties to Afghanistan’s Uzbek and Turkmen communities, constitutes a means for Ankara to create a sphere of influence in the southwest Asian country, where it can serve as a potential jumping-off point to expand influence into Central Asia --- the land of its forefathers and fellow Turkic peoples.
It is way too early to say what those with an interest in what becomes of the Afghan Taliban insurgency will do with this complex web of competing and conflicting geopolitical calculi as they move toward a settlement. They do not all have an equal say. The United States is the prime mover, and so all states must plan to align themselves with the United States’ exit timetable. In a best-case scenario, some states will walk away with some gains and others will have to cut their losses. In a worst-case scenario, all of these efforts fail and Afghanistan descends into a state of nature where the balance of power is sorted out the old-fashioned way.
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