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2 Hot air over Taliban
talks By Philip Smucker
KABUL - No politician or diplomat in
Kabul, Afghan or Western, appears ready to talk to
the one-eyed Taliban leader Mullah Omar or the
"mad" Mullah Dadullah, who in any case are too
busy fighting an insurgency and kidnapping
foreigners to pay any attention.
But with
Afghanistan's Taliban movement slowly expanding
its grip across the east and south of the country,
the idea of making "peace" with a fundamentalist
Islamic movement still closely
allied
with Osama bin Laden is back on the table.
Last week, to the shock and dismay of many
of the country's ethnic Tajiks, Afghan President
Hamid Karzai announced publicly that he was in
closed-door discussions with the Taliban. To whom
precisely he was talking was left unmentioned.
The secrecy hasn't gone over well with
Karzai's rivals. In an interview, Afghanistan's
parliamentary Speaker, a key figure in a new
anti-Karzai coalition, sounded infuriated. "For
us, his admission last week that he has been
talking to the Taliban comes as a complete
surprise," said Younus Qanooni, kneading a set of
ruby-red prayer beads in the posh salon in his
home. "We were not informed about these
closed-curtain talks."
Qanooni is an
intelligent, slightly built Tajik who earned his
jihadist stripes as a confidant of the "Lion of
Panshir", Ahmed Shah Masoud, who was murdered by
an al-Qaeda suicide cameraman two days before
September 11, 2001. Since then, he has served as
interior minister and education minister.
Also last week, together with several
other Karzai rivals, Qanooni formed a new
northern-dominated opposition group, the United
National Front (UNF), whose members include former
defense minister Mohammad Fahim, former Afghan
president Burhanuddin Rabbani, and Prince Mustafa
Zahir, the grandson of the deposed and ailing king
Mohammad Zahir Shah. Many in this group favor
eliminating the Taliban with extreme prejudice.
But the UNF has other good reasons to
oppose Karzai's secret dealings with the Taliban.
For one, Karzai hails from the Taliban's Pashtun
homeland in the south, which makes them part of
his own political base. For another, key members
of the Karzai-led government are major players in
a multibillion-dollar narcotics business that
stands as a major hurdle to the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization's stabilization efforts across
the south and east.
Raw drug production is
often protected by Taliban forces that have kept
NATO forces locked down for months. But there are
nuances to the drug trade that suggest a nexus of
cooperation among drug dealers, terrorists and the
Karzai government. The governor of Helmand
province, Asadullah Wafa, complained recently to
leading counter-narcotics officials in Kabul that
government "eradicators" endowed with tens of
millions of US dollars' worth of US
government-supplied equipment are demanding stiff
bribes in exchange for not destroying poppy
fields.
The situation is so fraught with
peril from farmers prepared to take up arms with
the Taliban to protect their bumper poppy crops
that British and Canadian forces often insist to
Afghan tribal elders that "we have nothing to do
with the drug-eradication business", according to
a seasoned British reporter, who has spent the
past several months in the south.
So just
what do Karzai's negotiations with the Taliban
imply as to his own motivations and the goals of
the international community to stabilize the
country and wipe out terrorism?
Ahmed
Rashid, Pakistani author of The Taliban,
told National Public Radio in the US last week
that because Washington had not pushed Pakistani
President General Pervez Musharraf hard enough to
go after Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan, the
Pashtun-led extremist movement has grown immensely
in recent months and, in Rashid's words, is
"probably a bigger threat now than al-Qaeda" to
Afghanistan.
Indeed, Western diplomats say
they are increasingly concerned about the
"Talibanization" of both Pakistan and Afghanistan,
which they believe is assisted by senior al-Qaeda
operatives based in Pakistan as well as rogue
elements within Pakistan's intelligence services.
A time bomb is ticking in South Asia as
terror tactics that have proved successful in Iraq
are embraced by Taliban tacticians.
With
al-Qaeda still working hand-in-hand with the
extremist movement, Karzai's negotiations are in a
sense tantamount to "talking to the terrorists",
something US administration officials say - for US
public consumption - that they categorically
oppose.
In Afghanistan, however, that view
is a non-starter. The history of the country is
one of deal-making with the devil - often in the
form of your fellow countrymen - all for the sake
of survival. In other
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