Meeting the Taliban: row over talks exposes divide

http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,,2232354,00.html

Meeting the Taliban: row over talks exposes divide
· Afghanistan US suspicious of British attempts at engagement
· Kabul government split on ethnic and political lines
Declan Walsh in Islamabad
Thursday December 27, 2007
The Guardian

The threatened expulsion of two senior western officials from Afghanistan yesterday laid bare growing tensions over Kabul's great burning issue: can the Taliban be brought to the negotiating table?

Britain is quietly spearheading efforts to engage militants who are ready to quit the Taliban, although Downing Street vehemently denies reports that MI6 opened talks with some Taliban commanders last summer, trying to convince them to stop shooting by appealing to their better feelings - or through large cash payments.

The enthusiasm for deal-making has echoes of the Raj, when British officers roamed the wild Pashtun lands. But it is most firmly rooted in Britain's struggle to tame Helmand, where more than 7,000 troops are trapped in a bloody fight against an obdurate enemy.

The policy has been resisted by the US military, which is suspicious of attempts to negotiate with "terrorists" and which instead relies heavily on military force.

"The Americans have a way of painting this black and white," said one European official. "For them it's like a cowboy film - you're either a good guy or a bad guy. But anyone with any experience in this country knows it's not that simple."

US generals point to the fiasco of Musa Qala, the strategic Helmand town where British officers struck an experimental peace deal with local insurgents in late 2006, only to see the Taliban seize control in February. The town became a base of Taliban operations and drug smuggling, until Nato seized it back this month.

The two western officials who face expulsion today, Michael Semple and Mervyn Patterson, met tribal elders in Musa Qala on Monday.

The Afghan government is also divided, but along ethnic and political lines. About 5,000, mostly low-level insurgents - disparaged as "cannon fodder" by one western official - have swapped sides under a long-running "national reconciliation" programme. But government officials of the former Northern Alliance, which helped topple the Taliban in 2001 and is dominated by Tajiks, remain hostile to any moves to bring more senior Taliban commanders into power in Kabul.

Ordinary Afghans are desperate for an end to a wave of violence that has surged to new heights - more than 5,000 deaths in 2007, many of them civilians - but terrified of a return to the medieval punishments and harsh repression that characterised the Taliban government.

The UN supports the Taliban contacts, saying reports from political officers in the provinces indicate that many commanders are looking for a "way out". The UN believes it is possible to separate the hardcore leadership linked to al-Qaida from less ideological commanders driven by money, nationalism or disaffection with Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai.

"We know the Taliban are not a homogenous group. Some have been coerced into fighting, others have been paid," said UN spokesman Aleem Siddique. "The important thing is to focus on those people who can be brought under the big tent of the government of Afghanistan to support the peace process."

Some analysts say talks will only undermine the fragile national parliament elected in 2005 and human rights groups worry that they could bring notorious rights abusers back into power. "There is an urgent need for greater clarity in who we should be talking to, when and why," admitted one western official in Kabul.

Karzai himself has repeatedly offered to open direct talks with the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar. But he is reportedly angry with British efforts to pursue talks without his knowledge.

In such a fluid and complex situation first-hand local knowledge is vital - which is what the EU's Semple and the UN's Patterson were trying to obtain this week, friends and colleagues said yesterday. Some were confident they will shortly be able to return to Kabul, terming the controversy a "hiccup". But for now their services are no longer available.