Push on Talks With Taliban Confirmed by NATO Officials

Push on Talks With Taliban Confirmed by NATO Officials
By HELENE COOPER and THOM SHANKER
Copyright by Reuters
Published: October 14, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/15/world/asia/15nato.html?_r=1&hp


BRUSSELS — The United States is helping senior Taliban leaders attend initial peace talks with the Afghan government in Kabul because military officials and diplomats want to take advantage of any possibility of political reconciliation, Obama administration and NATO officials said Thursday.

Even as top American officials cautioned that they are not yet ready to formally join the nascent peace effort with their Taliban foes of the past nine years, they acknowledged that the reconciliation effort is a key part of the American-led war in Afghanistan.

“Whenever opportunity arise that are worth exploring, we ought to take advantage of that,” said Defense Secretary Robert Gates, appearing before reporters alongside Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at a NATO conference here. “Whether this leads into something concrete,” Mr. Gates said he couldn’t say, but added that “we need to be open to opportunities that arise.”

While Mrs. Clinton was even more cautious about the pace of the peace talks, she acknowledged during an interview on Thursday that while Americans may be squeamish about the idea of peace talks with the people who harbored Osama Bin Laden prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, the American public at some point may have to swallow the idea of reconciliation with the Taliban in order to have peace in Afghanistan.

“You don’t make peace with your friends,” Mrs. Clinton told ABC’s “Good Morning America” in an interview that aired on Thursday. She said that she thinks “it’s highly unlikely that the leadership of the Taliban that refused to turn over Bin Laden in 2001 will ever reconcile.” But, she added, “stranger things have happened in the history of war.”

The comments from President Obama’s two highest national security officials—which came during a press conference following a meeting of NATO foreign and defense ministers — came as the leader of Afghanistan’s new peace council, Burhanuddin Rabbani, confirmed in Kabul on Thursday that contacts with members of the Taliban had been made through mediators and that the international support for direct talks added new momentum to the effort.

On Wednesday, NATO and American officials confirmed that the United States and NATO have been doing much more to try to encourage a peaceful settlement than officials had previously disclosed, including helping former fighters and insurgents to travel to peace talks.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Thursday that the approach made sense. “This political reconciliation process is Afghan-led,” Mr. Rasmussen told a news conference. “But our position is that if we can facilitate this process through practical assistance, then why not? If we get a request and we can be of practical assistance, we are prepared to do that.”

Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, has for months been trying to persuade Taliban leaders to join his government, an effort which intensified last year after Mr. Obama announced that he would begin scaling back American troop levels in Afghanistan in July 2011.

American officials had previously said that they didn’t expect to begin serious reconciliation efforts until they had so degraded insurgents and militants on the field that Taliban leaders would feel they had no other choice but to pursue peace with the Afghan government. But while few military experts think the Taliban is degraded at this point, some administration officials in recent months have argued that the American military, backed by drone strikes, has at least rattled senior Taliban officials enough that they may be more amenable to a deal.

The officials caution that the outreach is deeply uncertain.

Still, Mr. Gates said Thursday that “we have always acknowledged that reconciliation has to be part of the solution in Afghanistan and we will do whatever we can to support this process.”

Burhanuddin Rabbani,Despite an uptick in airstrikes and intensified combat operations, this week has been an especially deadly one for NATO troops. Twenty-four service members were reported killed between Oct. 8 and Oct. 14.

In just the last two days, eight were killed in the south; two in the east and three in western Afghanistan, indicating insurgent activity in many parts of the country. The high number of deaths in the south are perhaps the least surprising since there are intense combat operations there.

The top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, told reporters in Afghanistan recently that high-level Taliban leaders were reaching out to senior Afghan officials to start discussions. General Petraeus seems determined to show progress on achieving American goals in Afghanistan — both military and political — ahead of the December review of the war effort ordered by Mr. Obama.

Support for talks also comes as American officials have expressed a growing frustration with the complex role played by Pakistan, which provides safe haven for many insurgents and has ambitions of dictating the postwar political situation in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has insisted that any lasting solution in Afghanistan must involve reconciliation with the Taliban, and has urged the United States to participate in peace talks. At the same time, Pakistan has disrupted some efforts by Mr. Karzai to reach out to Taliban leaders hiding in Pakistan, presumably because he made those overtures without Pakistan’s approval.

It is not clear which Taliban leaders have been allowed to travel to Kabul to conduct talks with Mr. Karzai’s government.

It took Mr. Karzai months to gather support for talks and form the 10-member council to conduct discussions. Mr. Rabbani — a political heavyweight who represents a faction long opposed to talks — was named its leader on Sunday.

In Kabul on Thursday, Mr. Rabbani expressed optimism. “I had talks with people related to the Taliban,” he said, “and I can feel willingness among the Taliban lines towards peace.”

For its part, the Taliban has publicly denied cooperating with moves toward negotiations.

In a statement e-mailed to news organizations on Wednesday, the Taliban denied the reports of high-level contacts as “baseless propaganda” and a tactic of psychological warfare by its enemies.

“The Islamic Emirate will not accept any kind of negotiation or ceasefire with the invading enemy until and unless the invaders have pulled out of Afghanistan,” the statement said.

Meanwhile, a diplomat in Kabul said that two government officials had been traveling to the eastern province of Khost to meet with representatives from the Haqqani network, Taliban allies operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The diplomat asked not to be named according to standard diplomatic ground rules of anonymity.

Officials in Washington have been cautious about prospects for a peaceful settlement. One senior American official noted recently that the Taliban, while war-weary, had little incentive to make concessions because they still had the sense that they could outlast the American presence in the country. Mr. Karzai, others noted, can be an erratic negotiator, and part of the mystery in Kabul is whether he is keeping American and NATO allies abreast of his conversations.

Mr. Obama signed off on a policy early this year that talks were possible as long as Taliban leaders, at the end of the process, agreed to renounce violence, lay down their arms, and pledge fidelity to the Afghan Constitution. As recently as August, two senior American officials said, Mr. Obama was updated on the progress of those efforts, officials said, and reaffirmed that the United States should aid the process, even if the Taliban involved in the talks represented only breakaway factions of the insurgent group.

“We’re not expecting Mullah Omar to walk in the door,” one senior administration official said recently, referring to the Taliban figure Mullah Muhammad Omar. “But there have been pings from commanders a few notches down.”

Congressional officials and independent experts voiced skepticism on Wednesday that the current discussions would lead to any immediate breakthrough.

“We’ve now got two years of reports of talks about talks, but none of it has panned out as serious,” said Bruce O. Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who led Mr. Obama’s first Afghanistan policy review.

But the increased NATO military operations in southern Afghanistan aimed at killing or capturing midlevel Taliban commanders has caused some Taliban leaders “nervousness about life and fortune,” Mr. Riedel said.

“It’s a more dicey game. You’re starting to see people wanting to put money down on all bets.”




Reporting was contributed by Carlotta Gall, Sangar Rahimi and Alissa J. Rubin in Kabul, and David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt in Washington.