Afghan peace conference backs Karzai plan to approach Taliban for talks

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Afghan conference calls for talks with Taliban

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghan President Hamid Karzai got a boost Friday from a national conference of tribal, religious and civic leaders for his plans to approach the Taliban to talk peace. Karzai’s more difficult challenge: convincing insurgent leaders and the Obama administration.

The United States supports overtures to lower-level militants but thinks talks with top leaders will go nowhere until NATO-led and Afghan forces are successful in weakening the Taliban and strengthening the Afghan government in Kandahar province and elsewhere in the south.

The Taliban insist no talks are possible until foreign troops withdraw from the country — a step Karzai cannot afford with the insurgency raging. U.S. officials contend the Taliban leadership feels it has little reason to negotiate because it believes it is winning the war.

Karzai, who organized the conference, clearly got what he wanted from it: a mandate for his peace efforts and his government months after his victory in an election tainted by fraud.

Still, the three-day conference, or jirga, represented the first major public debate in Afghanistan on how to end nearly nine years of war amid widespread belief here that the insurgency cannot be defeated militarily.

“The one significance of the jirga is that for the first time a collective and structured voice of Afghans for peace has been presented to the government and to the international community,” said Nader Nadery, deputy chairman of Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission.

Some 1,500 delegates from across the country attended the jirga, held in a colossal tent on the grounds of a university in Kabul. While active militant leaders were not invited, some former Taliban and their sympathizers came. Many of them remain in contact with Taliban foot soldiers — who till their farms by day and lay roadside bombs by night.

Nadery said it’s these rank-and-file Taliban who could be pressed by their communities to embrace the peace process, particularly if backed by government incentives.

“It’s significant for the Taliban to hear that Afghans from different walks of life … are tired of war, are calling on them to at least talk peace,” said Nadery. “The pressure from the communities won’t be immediate but it could be the beginning.”

As for the top leadership, the jirga’s final resolution says insurgents who want to take part must cut their ties with foreign terrorist groups — a clear reference to al-Qaida.

Taliban leaders like Mullah Mohammed Omar harbored Osama bin Laden and other planners of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks before a U.S.-led invasion ousted them from power later that year. The Taliban later rebounded as an insurgent movement, taking advantage of widespread discontent over government corruption and resentment among ethnic Pashtuns over the growing power of other ethnic groups.

To encourage the Taliban to come to the negotiating table, the resolution calls for militants who join the peace process to be removed from a U.N. blacklist. The blacklist imposes travel and financial restrictions on some 137 people associated with the Taliban.

The resolution also supports the release of Taliban prisoners in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and at Bagram Air Force Base north of the Afghan capital — and Karzai promised to make that a priority as a goodwill gesture to the militants.

The Obama administration was quick to praise the efforts of the jirga.

“We will continue to support the Afghan-led efforts on reconciliation and reintegration. We thought that the peace jirga accomplished its objectives and has provided a national consensus to pursue a political strategy to reduce the danger posed by the insurgency,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said. “We will continue to support Afghanistan as it moves forward.”

But any reconciliation talks will likely remain a long way off.

The Taliban rejected the jirga before it started, and their suicide attackers attempted to disrupt the opening of the conference Wednesday by firing rockets at the tent. The Taliban’s governing council would presumably have to approve any change of policy.

U.S.-led NATO troops are preparing a big offensive this summer in the Taliban heartland of Kandahar province. On Friday, NATO announced that its forces killed a top Taliban commander for Kandahar city, Mullah Zergay, in nearby Zhari district last week when a raid to capture him sparked a gunfight.

U.S. commanders say they will try to defeat the militants with a minimal use of force in an attempt to avoid inspiring more support for the Taliban among their fellow Pashtuns.

The jirga was held in the face of widespread doubts among Pashtuns that significant numbers of Taliban fighters will accept the deal, preferring instead to hold out until foreign troops are gone. President Barack Obama has pledged to begin pulling out U.S. troops in July 2011.

Progress on a political resolution remains key to any U.S. exit strategy. Pakistan, Iran and other neighboring nations have a stake in any design of a post-conflict Afghanistan. Without a reconciliation strategy, NATO and its Afghan allies have few options other than to try for a decisive victory — requiring a bigger investment in lives, treasure and time than the international coalition is prepared to make.

There have already been some tentative attempts at talks.

In March, a delegation of Hizb-i-Islami held talks with Karzai in Kabul. And Karzai’s government also reportedly held secret talks this year with Taliban’s No. 2, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, but the back-channel negotiations ended when he was arrested in neighboring Pakistan. Some delegates on Friday demanded Baradar’s release.

Some members of Afghanistan’s ethnic minorities fear Karzai may be too eager to sell out their interests in hopes of cutting a deal with the Taliban.

About 20 percent of the delegates were women, the target of some of the Taliban’s harshest edicts during their five-year hardline rule. They argued that women would have much to lose in a settlement that gives the insurgents a prominent political role in Afghan society.

Former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, the jirga chairman, suggested that the government set up a women-only commission to talk peace with the wives, mothers and sisters of Taliban fighters.

Karzai also suggested “a team of women should go to the Taliban women … to bring the message of peace to the mothers of the Taliban.”

Muslima Husseini, a delegate from northern Badakhshan province, said she and other women had had their say — and that even the most conservatives of delegates listened.

“We understand that this is a beginning. It is not a one-day peace process. We hope that the Taliban will want peace,” she said. “Maybe they are also fed up with war.”

Associated Press writers Rahim Faiez in Kabul and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.