The Afghan peace process mutates

[Ghundal]

The Afghan peace process mutates

http://blogs.rediff.com/mkbhadrakumar/2012/01/29/the-afghan-peace-process-mutates/

By M K Bhadrakumar – January 29, 2012


The peace doves are taking to the skies above the Hindu Kush in droves. So many have appeared that it is becoming difficult to tell which are the clay pigeons. The New York Times says talks have begun in Qatar between the American and Taliban diplomats. Yesterday’s news was that talks would commence in a few weeks.
Marc Grossman, US special representative (whom Pakistan embargoed and who therefore chose to travel to Qatar via Delhi), apparently has had meeting with his Taliban counterparts. Wonder if Grossman told the folks in Delhi what was on his mind. Unlikely, though. Even after Grossman’s consultations in Delhi, India still regards the Taliban as forces of darkness.
Never mind. India is peripheral and its opinions are of no consequence to Washington, which is already working out the modalities of transfer of the Taliban POWs in Guantanamo Bay to Qatar, as demanded by Grossman’s Taliban counterparts. Grossman apparently finalised the POW deal while in Qatar.
Now, when everything seems to be going honky dory, President Hamid Karzai abruptly muddies waters. His aides have revealed that on yet another track, Kabul government is also planning to engage the Taliban — but, in Saudi Arabia. A senior aide said, “Even if the Taliban office is established in Qatar, we will obviously pursue other efforts in the region, including Saudi Arabia and Turkey.” What one can make out from this bizarre development is that although the Americans twisted Karzai’s arm to such an extent that it really would have hurt like mad and might have forced him to sit on the floor and cry ‘Da, da, da, da, da‘ repeatedly to Qatar, he probably didn’t have his heart in it and his distaste for Qatar lingers like a foul smell in the mouth.
Evidently, Karzai sees that the Americans and Qataris get along like a house on fire and may strike a secret deal at some point over finessing the Taliban, which would be at his expense. So, he is likely ensuring he too has an act of his own where he is in command. Karzai is smart enough to capitalise on the suspicions Saudis too harbour about these Qatari upstarts who think no end of themselves as the new regional powerhouse in the Persian Gulf, usurping the House of Saud.
But that isn’t all. Karzai is also looking hard at the Pakistani offer lying on his table to resuscitate their bilateral civil-military commission for engaging the Taliban in reconciliation talks. The only hitch is that he insists that before he visits Islamabad again, a Pakistani VIP should first travel to Kabul and formally invite him. Protocol is protocol, after all. Accordingly, Pakistan Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar is travelling from Islamabad to Kabul on Wednesday to meet up with Karzai.
However, the real stunner is that Afghanistan and Pakistan are also preparing the next session of their trilateral forum with Iran — yes, the very same Iran which is besieged currently by 3 American aircraft carriers and British destroyers in the Strait of Hormuz. It seems President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad may travel to Islamabad to meet up with his Afghan and Pakistani counterparts Karzai and Asif Zardari at a summit meeting in February.
Clearly, the peace process is mutating uncontrollably. Some expert surgical intervention will be needed at some point and that is going to be messy since the mutation is happening so rapidly. The crucial challenge for the oncologist is going to be to determine which one is the real, genuine, benign Taliban and which one is the malignant pretender — the one in Qatar, Saudi Arabia or in Pakistan’s Quetta and North Waziristan. It all boils down to making out the real clay pigeons. Only a seasoned falconer can tell. Pakistan knows, for sure, but it won’t tell — at least, not until 2014.



Posted in Diplomacy, Politics.
Tagged with Hamid Karzai, Hina Rabbani Khar, Taliban office in Qatar, Taliban reconciliation.
By M K Bhadrakumar – January 29, 2012

[faye]

haha..love the ending. the plot thickens.

[faye]

just on the news. pakistan, karzai and saudi arabia are organising a meeting in saudi before the meeting in qatar.

[ComradePashtun]

"Pakistan knows, for sure, but it won’t tell"

And so does Karzai and the US.

[ComradePashtun]

Afghan Officials Consider Own Talks With Taliban

By GRAHAM BOWLEY and DECLAN WALSH

Published: January 30, 2012

KABUL, Afghanistan — Concerned that it is being left out of potential peace talks between the United States and the Taliban, the Afghan government is pushing to open its own direct negotiations with the insurgent group in Saudi Arabia, Afghan officials said on Monday.



The talks would be separate from efforts by the United States to begin negotiations with the Taliban in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar, where the Taliban is opening an office, the officials said.



It was not clear whether the effort to start parallel talks would succeed or amount to nothing more than an attempt by President Hamid Karzai to regain momentum after feeling sidelined by the American efforts to help open the Qatar office.



“We don’t know the exact timing, but that is something that is being discussed within the government and with the Taliban,” said a senior Afghan official in Kabul who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk publicly about the deliberations.



Mr. Karzai’s office in Kabul would not comment on the possibility of talks in Saudi Arabia.



Afghanistan’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Said Ahmad Omarkhail, said, “The Saudi government is willing to help us in resolving the problems with the Taliban.” Afghanistan had made preparations for talks with Taliban officials in Riyadh, Mr. Omarkhail said, but he made it clear that he had not been told that any meetings were scheduled.



Another Afghan official in Kabul said on Monday that the Taliban preferred Saudi Arabia as a location for talks and that Afghan government officials, including Mr. Karzai, would meet with Taliban representatives there “soon.”



For any talks to be held in Riyadh, the Afghan government would need the agreement of the Saudi government. But senior Western and United States officials doubt the Saudis would want to become involved in open-ended peace talks that have no guarantee of succeeding.



It is also not clear whether the United States would welcome two tracks of talks, especially if it is excluded from one track, though American officials have said often that any negotiations would ultimately have to be “Afghan to Afghan.”



“Our goal is to work ourselves out of a job here,” the State Department’s spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said in Washington on Monday. “Our goal is to get Afghans talking to Afghans to get a process of reconciliation that is among Afghans.”



She declined to discuss the negotiations in detail, but said the question of opening a Taliban office in Qatar was still not decided. The Taliban have yet to say definitively that they intend to engage in any talks. In the past they have insisted that any talks be with the Americans only, and not the Afghan government, which they reject as a “puppet regime.”



However, on Monday a Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, did not deny that there was a plan for talks in Saudi Arabia. “Our stand is silence regarding an ongoing peace dialogue at the moment,” he said.



If there are talks, the role of Pakistan, Afghanistan’s neighbor, remains undecided. Afghan and some Taliban officials have told the United States that they do not want Pakistan to have a full seat at the table. For its part, Pakistan’s military would much prefer Saudi mediation in peace talks.



Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have strong ties dating to the 1980s, when the Soviets occupied Afghanistan and Riyadh pumped billions of dollars in aid to Afghan rebel groups based in northern Pakistan, and supported a conservative tilt in Pakistani society whose effects endure.



“Our favorites are the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates,” said Tanveer Ahmed Khan, a retired Pakistani diplomat and political commentator. “When it comes to Qatar, there have always been reservations.”



The Taliban, however, may be less keen on Saudi involvement. One of the insurgents’ early demands to American officials was that negotiations not take place in Saudi Arabia, a former Obama administration official said.
“The Taliban specifically wanted the office” in Doha, the capital of Qatar, “because they didn’t want to be under the thumb of the Pakistanis,” said the official.



Analysts said the push for a Saudi office, which was first reported by the BBC, was being driven by Mr. Karzai, who fears being sidelined in American-led talks.


“This is related to Karzai’s frustration and fears,” said Shamila N. Chaudhary, a senior fellow at the New American Foundation, a nonprofit policy group in Washington. “He thinks the Americans are going to hang him out to dry, and that a deal with the Taliban is going to lead to his ouster.



“His talking about the Saudi angle is just a reminder to everyone that he is still relevant to the process,” Ms. Chaudhary said.



Pakistan’s foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, is scheduled to arrive in Kabul on Wednesday, in a bid to heal relations between the two neighbors that collapsed in acrimony last year after the assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, Mr. Karzai’s main envoy to the Taliban.



For weeks, Afghan officials have been fuming over the American efforts to allow the Taliban to open an office in Qatar. At first they said they preferred that discussions take place in Saudi Arabia or Turkey, but this month, after the Taliban accepted the American initiative, Mr. Karzai reluctantly agreed to Qatar.



Several former Taliban officials said that some Taliban negotiators had already begun meeting with American officials in Qatar, to discuss preliminary trust-building measures, including a possible prisoner transfer. As the preliminary talks have progressed, Afghan officials have said they feared a “secret deal” between the United States and the Taliban.



The Obama administration hopes the negotiation process will unfold in three phases — exploratory, confidence-building and political, according to a former administration official who could not speak for attribution because he was not authorized to discuss the talks. The administration considers that first phase to be now drawing to a close.



The exact details of the Taliban “office” in Doha are still being hammered out — where it would be located, for instance, and what format any talks would take. Qatari security services are expected to have a major role in watching over Taliban negotiators, particularly any who may be released from the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay.



“If the detainee transfer goes ahead, and they are sent over there, then they would be heavily monitored. It would probably be a form of house arrest,” said the former Obama official.



The administration’s goal is to establish the Doha office by the time of a NATO summit meeting scheduled to take place in Chicago this May.

[ComradePashtun]

Afghanistan to press Pakistan for access to Taliban
* Afghan security sources say Kabul will use Khar’s visit to press for access to Mullah Baradar, members of Quetta Shura

KABUL: Afghanistan will press Pakistan for access to Taliban leaders during a one-day visit to Kabul by Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar, with Afghan officials hoping to ease cross-border strains and lay the ground for peace negotiations with the insurgents.

Khar will visit Kabul tomorrow (Wednesday) to discuss reconciliation and nascent plans for peace talks ahead of a meeting between representatives of the Afghan government and the Taliban in Saudi Arabia.

“We hope it will mark a new phase in the relationship between both countries,” Afghan Foreign Ministry spokesman Janan Mosazai said on Monday.

Senior Afghan security sources said Afghan officials would use Khar’s visit to press for access to Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder of the Taliban captured in Pakistan in 2010, as well as other members of a Taliban council known as the Quetta Shura, where the leaders are said to be based.

Baradar, a close associate of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden before the September 11 attacks, had been ranked second to Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar. He was captured in Karachi by Pakistani and US intelligence agents in February 2010.

“When the Pakistan delegation visits here, we will be asking for direct access to the Quetta Shura, or access to Mullah Baradar, who has been in Pakistan custody, as a gesture of good faith,” said a senior Afghan security source.

“We want sincere cooperation from Pakistan in regards to peace talks,” said the source.

Peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government will be held in Saudi Arabia this year, an Afghan official in Riyadh said.

“The talks will be held in Saudi, but there is no set date yet,” the official said.

The Taliban announced this month they would open a political office in the Qatari capital Doha to support possible peace talks with the US and key allies, seen by supporters as the best chance of reaching a ceasefire ahead of the foreign troop withdrawal over the next three years.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai fears being sidelined by US-led efforts to forge peace with the Taliban, so he may be pushing for alternative talks in Saudi Arabia.

“The government has been paranoid since the secret talks opened between the US and the Taliban, and we believe Pakistan feels the same,” the Afghan security source said.

As a confidence-building measure, the terrorist group called for the release of its five members being held at Guantanamo Bay.

A spokesman for the US Embassy in Kabul declined to comment on the likelihood of separate Afghan-Taliban negotiations, but said senior US envoys had consistently called for Pakistan to be part of efforts to end a war stretching into its 11th year. reuters

[ComradePashtun]

Anything less than a direct and unlimited access to Taliban should not move an inch the Afghan position with Pakistan.

[abassinafghan]

thats true Taliban must have direct talks with the americans as with the na/kharzai everything else will undertermine their position as their image , at least they have to keep their face .


mullah bradar is already with uncle sam , the pakis sold him out , as soon he announced that he is willing to have direct talks with the americans

[ComradePashtun]

You may have a point on the efficacy of peace process or peace-building between the Taliban and the government given the interests groups in the current government and it may also be questionable whether if there are people in the current govt who genuinely wishes for peace and have the propensity for a viable settlement. This in itself has had negative impact on the credibility of the current govt so to speak in many aspects. But eventually the final peace-making and settlement has to be between Afghans. I am hoping that president Karzai has ability to steer and moderate any eventual political settlement between Taliban and those that they need to reconcile with and come a to a politically viable solution for Afghanistan - if he doesn't then someone else or for that matter the U.S. would have to do it since they are major stakeholders and would be liable to proceed with the process in its own terms.

[ComradePashtun]

Sometime you have to content with whatever you have or you are; in Afghanistan's case and in its people's interest amidst all that is happening is that Afghans and Afghanistan govt (which is better than what we had or nothing) takes the lead in the process and on the other side Taliban who are also Afghans talk directly with Afghans too. They may well have legit reservation as I pointed to above, but they do have to be cognizant of the fact that they do not play in to the Paki hands. It is in best interest of Pakistan that things are broken and fragmented in Afghanistan so it is able to manipulate and serve its evil and atrocious interests which are found through Afghan misery and calamity.