August 2, 2009
UN chief scorns Miliband plan for Taliban talks
Christina Lamb in Kabul and Stephen Grey

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TALKS with the Taliban must include the movement’s leadership or they will not result in peace, the top United Nations official in Afghanistan has warned as differences emerge within the international community about a strategy to end the eight-year war.

“If you want important results you need to talk to people who are important,” said Kai Eide, the special representative for the UN secretary-general, in an interview with The Sunday Times.

“We won’t get where we want by negotiating with local commanders on the ground. That’s an inadequate peace process and that won’t work.”

His views contrast with those of David Miliband, the foreign secretary, who called last week for talks with local Taliban commanders and what he referred to as “second or third tier Taliban” or “moderate Taliban”.
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In a speech at Nato headquarters in Brussels, Miliband said military commanders should work with the Afghan government “to separate hardline idealogues who are essentially irreconcilable and violent from those who can be drawn into a domestic political process”.

Many believe there is no real point in negotiating with anyone other than Mullah Omar, the one-eyed Taliban leader, and his ruling council, the Quetta shura.

“If you engage partially you will have partial results. We have to have a political process that is all-inclusive. That’s the only way to bring this conflict to an end,” said Eide.

John Butt, the Muslim chaplain at Cambridge University, who runs radio stations in Pakistan and Afghanistan aimed at spreading a message of peace, concurred. “It is pointless talking to anyone but Mullah Omar if you want this war to end,” he said.

Talk about talks has been going on since last September, when King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia invited key figures to a reception in Mecca. Subsequent meetings have taken place in Dubai but little progress has been achieved.

Alternatives to more soldiers on the ground are also being canvassed. Under a new British plan to use “village power”, former Taliban fighters would be retrained and offered work.

Ministers are lobbying the United States to make this reintegration process an essential condition for continuing the flow of billions of dollars of aid given each year to support the Afghanistan government.

The scheme aims to revive and extend a controversial experiment that took place in Helmand province in 2007 which led to what UK intelligence agencies claim was the defection of large numbers of Taliban fighters.

With cash already promised by Japan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and a secret experiment under way in three provinces, the programme aims to let governors deal directly with local Taliban commanders and give them a way out of the fighting, if they want it. This may involve cash for job creation and training.

The earlier experiment was ultimately cancelled after it enraged President Hamid Kar-zai. He expelled from the country Michael Semple, an Irish official at the European Union who had played a key role in the project.

Last week Semple welcomed the new British plan, saying there was a “substantial” part of the Taliban movement that could be willing to stop fighting - under the right conditions.

“Until now, Nato and the Afghan government have never seriously deployed one of the most powerful weapons available to them in defeating this rebellion, namely peace-making,” he said.

According to diplomats and senior military officials on both sides of the Atlantic, the Miliband initiative put to US leaders in Washington last week represents an implicit challenge to the idea that the war can be won by flooding the country with tens of thousands more troops, foreign and Afghan.

One senior source said direct talks with Taliban leaders such as Omar were not ruled out. However, the key to success, according to the UK plan, would be undermining the rebellion at a local level and not primarily by military means.

The source said: “We are not going to secure this country by garrisoning it. We are not going to win by putting men in uniform and rifles in forts and dotting them over the countryside. More troops can actually mean a provocation.”

In Helmand, British intelligence believes that in the past three years of fighting the Taliban opposition may have doubled in strength.

Semple said Taliban commanders and their fighters should be offered credible guarantees about their future security and livelihoods: “If foreigners and Afghans are effectively working at cross purposes you can never deliver on any deal.”

Violence is expected to worsen in the run-up to elections in three weeks’ time.

Almost half the country is considered a no-go area or highly unsafe and it is not clear where security will be found to protect the 28,000 polling stations.

The biggest sticking point in bringing the Taliban to the table remains their demand for a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops. The United States has intensified efforts to increase the size of the Afghan army, but local troops are still many years from being able to take over the country’s security.

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who is an architect of the administration’s Afghan policy, said last week that the hardcore Taliban leadership could be peeled away from the rank-and-file fighters.

“What this means in practice is you are not going to have a negotiated settlement with the Taliban leadership. I think that is highly unlikely. But what you might see is that if the momentum of the Taliban is reversed, we might see the onion starting to peel away,” Riedel said.

Additional reporting: Michael Smith, Washington

Roadside bombs made invisible

Taliban fighters in Afghanistan are using carbon rods and glass, instead of metal pressure plates and nails, to make explosive devices invisible to theBritish Army’s metal detectors, writes Jerome Starkey.

Lieutenant-Colonel Andrew Duncan, the most senior British bomb disposal officer in Afghanistan, said the insurgents were also placing “low metal” devices more “cleverly” this summer.

Of 22 British soldiers killed in the country during July, the highest monthly toll of the conflict, 19 died in explosions.

A further 57 were injured in the first half of the month. Most of the bombs are made in small “factories” in Helmand.

Nato is aiming to disrupt the bigger players.

“The financiers and the facilitators are the people you need to get,” Duncan said.