The Taliban’s former foreign minister said on Saturday that the group remained a united force, adding that Afghan President Hamid Karzai needed to initiate wide-ranging talks to save the country from more bloodshed. Speaking to Reuters in Kabul, Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil noted that “the Taliban to a large extent is the only group that has remained united before and after its fall. If we look back to past years, evidence shows that they have expanded and increased their operations and there is the possibility of that once again”. Karzai’s reconciliation efforts to bring what he calls moderate Taliban into the mainstream have so far failed, as have his efforts to invite senior leaders for talks.
However, Muttawakil was optimistic about recent peace overtures to the Taliban at a summit of tribal chiefs in Kabul. The former Taliban foreign minister said that the calls for peace, which came days after Karzai had renewed an offer of negotiations with various guerrilla forces – would bolster the Afghan president’s position. But, he warned, Karzai still needed to build trust.
Muttawakil said that any talks should include Taliban leaders as well as former Afghan prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who
He went on to say that the Afghan “government needs to show a gesture of goodwill and for that the prisoners should be released”, referring to the hundreds of Taliban suspects held by Afghan and US authorities in both Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba.
Muttawakil surrendered to US-led forces after the overthrow of the Taliban and was released from custody in 2003. Refusing a job offered with the government, he stood for the 2005 parliamentary elections but failed to win a seat. Muttawakil, 37, lives with his family in a rented house under the protection of the Kabul government, where he spends most of his time reading books, mostly in Arabic and Pashto. The former Taliban foreign minister has met Karzai several times and is the only high ranking Taliban leader to have surrendered since the fall of the regime.