Taliban talks halted by Pakistan arrests: UN envoy

[pir_Rokhan]

Kai Eide, who stepped down from the post earlier this month, confirmed for the first time that he had been holding talks with senior Taliban figures and said they started around a year ago, AFP reported.

Face-to-face talks were held with “senior figures in the Taliban leadership” in Dubai and other locations, said the diplomat, adding he believed the movement's leader Mullah Omar had given the process the green light.

“Of course I met Taliban leaders during the time I was in Afghanistan,” the Norwegian diplomat told the broadcaster at his home outside Oslo.

“The first contact was probably last spring, then of course you moved into the election process where there was a lull in activity.”

Eide said that “communication picked up when the election process was over, and it continued to pick up until a certain moment a few weeks ago.”

He was referring to the arrest of senior Taliban commanders in Pakistan in recent weeks, a move which had been welcomed in the United States as a sign of the country's increasing willingness to track down Afghan militant leaders.

But the diplomat said the detentions had a “negative” effect on attempts to find a political solution to the eight-year-old Afghan war and suggested Pakistan had deliberately tried to undermine the negotiations.

He also said there were now many channels of communication with the Taliban, including with representatives of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Eide said these contacts were “in the early stages ... talks about talks”, adding it would take a long time before there was enough confidence between both sides to really move forward.

“The effect of the arrests, in total, certainly was negative on our possibilities to continue the political process that we saw as so necessary at that particular juncture,” he said.

“The Pakistanis did not play the role they should have played. They must have known about this,” said Eide.

“I don't believe these people were arrested by coincidence. They must have known who they were, what kind of role they were playing — and you see the result today.”

Pakistani officials have insisted the arrests were not aimed at wrecking the talks, the BBC reported.

Taliban military commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar was captured last month in the southern Pakastani city of Karachi, in what US media said was a joint operation with American spies.

Other senior Taliban commanders have also reportedly been captured in Pakistan recently.

Reports first emerged that Eide met Taliban figures after an international conference on Afghanistan in London in January.

Asked about the level of contact in the talks, Eide told the BBC: “We met senior figures in the Taliban leadership and we also met people who have the authority of the Quetta Shura to engage in that kind of discussion.”

The Quetta Shura is the name given to the Taliban leadership council, which takes its name from the city of Quetta where the senior members of the militia are thought to have been based.

Asked whether the leader of the Taliban movement Mullah Omar would have known about the talks, he said: “I find it unthinkable that such contact would take place without his knowledge and also without his acceptance.”

Eide stepped down from his position as United Nations representative in Afghanistan earlier this month after two years in the post which saw violence escalate and the UN role in fraud-tainted elections mired in controversy.

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/world/14-taliban-talks-halted-by-pakistan-arrests-ex-un-envoy-zj-02

[Talal]

So we arrest taliban we are bad, we dont arrest taliban we are still bad...truly all pakistanis are evil

I cant believe these BS hypocrites, and the UN no less ?! what business does UN have negotiating with taliban ? we are fighting a god damn war because of these people and they go behind our back and start negotiating with the same monsters who haev turned this world into a living hell..Here is the responce of a UN envoy to this article

The former envoy to Afghanistan for the United Nations, Kai Eide, has criticized Pakistan for arresting top Taliban leaders, such as the group's second-in-command Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar last month. Speaking to the BBC, Eide said the arrests hurt reconciliation efforts by stopping secret talks between the United Nations and the Taliban, which started about a year ago.

In a recent television interview, the U.N.'s former special representative to Afghanistan, Kai Eide, said he believes "the Pakistanis did not play the role that they should have played" when they arrested top Taliban leaders.

He said he believes the Pakistani government must have known about the U.N.-brokered peace talks with the Taliban and that the arrests were counterproductive to those efforts.

Pakistan's former interior minister, Aftab Sherpao, says he would like to remind the former U.N. representative that Pakistan has carried a heavy burden since the U.S.-led invasion into Afghanistan toppled the Taliban eight years ago.

"I think the role Pakistan has played, no other country has played that role," he said. "And if you look at the casualties, you look at the human suffering, you look at what we are going through, our economy has suffered, everything has suffered."

He says he believes the Pakistani government made these arrests under the impression that they were in the best interest for the Pakistani people and the rest of the region.

Ishtiaq Ahmad, an associate professor for international relations at Islamabad's Quaid-i-Azam University, says Kai Eide's comments reflect a concern that Pakistan is trying to sabotage the Afghan government's efforts to reconcile with the Taliban.

He says the reasoning for this comes from the perception that Kabul is leaving Islamabad out of the reconciliation process by approaching the Taliban leadership directly without any Pakistani help.

"It might have created, you know, some kind of insecurity among Pakistanis and they might have taken this action, but again, it is all speculative," he said.

Ahmad also says Pakistan now finds itself in an even more complicated diplomatic position.

He points to years of U.S. pressure on Pakistani authorities to "do more" to target Taliban members who fled from Afghanistan to Pakistan.

"If Pakistan does not arrest a Taliban leader, then there is a complaint that Pakistan is not doing enough," he said. "And when it does arrest, and then there is, you know, this new kind of complaint."

Ahmad says that in the end, a political resolution to the Afghan conflict is in the interest for all of Afghanistan's neighbors and stakeholders in the war-torn country.

[Talal]

^Pakistan arrested them so they can have a seat in the negotiating table.

we nabbed them way before these "negotiations" began, man come on this is dead wrong. No credit where credit's due, nobody looks at the fact that what the hell is a UN convoy hooking up with taliban for ??

[Talal]

^I mean, The timing speaks for itself.

So if they want to negotiate with taliban why they keep telling us to keep bombing them, why fight the taliban in the first place. On one side they keep telling us to "do more" and while we are fighting they sneak around and try to negotiate with these people ? Where is the fairness in that ?

[Talal]

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/po...er_deputy_says

Eide "greatly exaggerating" Taliban talks, former deputy says

Former U.N. representative in Afghanistan Kai Eide is greatly exaggerating his new claims that he had months of discussions with senior Taliban leaders, his former top deputy tells The Cable.

"He was not meeting with senior Taliban leaders," said Peter Galbraith, who was Eide's No. 2 and close friend until Eide fired him for raising questions about the U.N.'s lack of action over the massive election fraud perpetrated by President Hamid Karzai's government last September, in an interview. "He's greatly exaggerating."

Galbraith, who was aware of the meetings but did not participate in them, said that they were with lower-level people who may or may not have had ties to the Taliban.

"The meetings were not particularly often and it was never clear where these people stood and what their connections were to the Taliban," he said, suggesting they might have been disgruntled former Taliban associates.

Galbraith also rejected Eide's contention that the recent arrests of Afghan Taliban leaders by the Pakistani military was the reason the talks broke down, as Eide claims.

"The discussions ended when he left UNAMA," he said, referring to the removal of Eide by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in December. "The arrests have nothing to do with it."

Galbraith is clearly no disinterested observer, but Special Representative Richard Holbrooke also said Friday that the recent arrests and the drive to pursue reconciliation with the Taliban have nothing to do with each other.

"We are extremely gratified that the Pakistani government has apprehended the No. 2 person in the Afghan Taliban ... this is a good thing," Holbrooke said. "It's not related [to reconciliation] ... We don't see this as linked."

The U.S. government was aware of Eide's discussions. "He had mentioned this to us in a general way," Holbrooke said, responding to questions posed by The Cable at a Friday press conference, adding that there was no U.S. involvement in the talks.

Holbrooke had called the press conference to discuss the next week's landmark meetings between the United States and Pakistan in Washington, the first round of the new "strategic dialogue" between the two countries.

"It's a major intensification of our partnership," said Holbrooke. "This is not a photo op ... this is an intense, serious dialogue between the U.S. and Pakistan."

The Pakistani delegation will be led by Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and will also include Defense Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar, incoming Finance Minister Abdul Hafeez Shaikh, Army Chief of Staff Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Prime Minister Zardari's advisor Wazir Ali, Ambassador to Washington Husain Haqqani, and many others.

The U.S. contingent will be led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and will include Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Holbrooke, U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson, Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew, NSC Senior Director David Lipton, USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah, Under Secretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy, and many others.

The trilateral dialogue between the United States, Afghanistan, and Pakistan will still go on and another meeting could come later this year, according to Holbrooke. Holbrooke is headed back to the region next week, stopping off in Brussels before going on to Afghanistan. He was going to stop in Pakistan but that became unnecessary because the Pakistanis are coming to Washington, he said.

The question of how to disperse billions of dollars of new aid to Pakistan, a point of contention between Holbrooke and Senate leaders, was discussed during a high-level meeting at the White House Friday morning, Holbrooke said, where "almost every senior person in the United States foreign policy community was in the room."

[Niazi]

we nabbed them way before these "negotiations" began, man come on this is dead wrong. No credit where credit's due, nobody looks at the fact that what the hell is a UN convoy hooking up with taliban for ??

Muha! claver aren't you ,Pakistan got them not becouse Pakistan has brotherly love for us,becose cloud not use them anymore and they knew too much of Pakistan dirty secrets ,so ISI cod not posssibaly risk that ,if your paksitan were honest in thier claim so why they refused to give them to Afghan goverment,so before you spew more craps please think claver boy!

[Khanisking]

Pakistan simply did this because they are scared of India being allies with Afghanistan.

If India and Afghanistan become allies, Pakistan is doomed. If they go to war, it would be attacked from both sides.


However, we Afghans(Pashtuns) wont let that happen as we love our Pakistani counterparts, Not the Govt.

[Talal]

Muha! claver aren't you ,Pakistan got them not becouse Pakistan has brotherly love for us,becose cloud not use them anymore and they knew too much of Pakistan dirty secrets ,so ISI cod not posssibaly risk that ,if your paksitan were honest in thier claim so why they refused to give them to Afghan goverment,so before you spew more craps please think claver boy!

Bardar isnt being kept in Pakistan to safeguard our secrets, he is being kept there because we need solid ground intel regarding which taliban proxies India is using to sponsor TTP, we need that info to effectively take out the sponsor routes for this damned insurgency within our borders. The intel gathered from bardar has helped Pakistan identify which Afghan proxies are being used within Pakistan to sponsor the TTP, with the help of that intel pakistan has nabbed the motherload of TTP from all over Pakistan not to mention all the success they've had recovering ammuntitions and whatnot..His arrest was a milestone in breaking that last strand of TTP network within Pakistan.

Comprende ? and its spelled "clever" though a fact so obvious doesn't require that much gray matter