The Taliban said Monday it was ready for talks with the Afghan government after President Hamid Karzai offered negotiations in a bid to end the rebels’ nearly six-year bloody insurgency.Karzai made the offer on Sunday, with the insurgency spiralling to its highest level this year, saying peace could not be achieved without dialogue. “For the sake of national interests ... we are fully ready for talks with the government,” senior Taliban spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi told AFP. “Whenever the government formally asks for negotiations, we are ready,” he said.
| The movement had a “limited” number of conditions for a meeting, he added without elaborating. |
Ahmadi said the Taliban could hold talks with the Afghan government as they had with South Korean officials over 21 hostages whom the hardliners freed last month after several meetings. “As we did hold negotiations with the South Korean government, we can hold talks at an even higher level with the government,” he said by telephone from an undisclosed location.
Seoul was criticised for negotiating with “terrorists” to free the aid workers captured mid-July. Two were executed when the Afghan government refused a demand to free Taliban prisoners. Ahmadi said it was not clear if Karzai’s offer was genuine. “Our understanding is the government, which terms the Taliban as terrorists, would not ask for negotiations,” he said.
Karzai has regularly offered talks with the Taliban and there have been rumours that contact has already been made. He denied Sunday that “formal negotiations” were under way with the militants but said he was ready to start such dialogue if he could find the “address for the Taliban.” Ahmadi said: “If they want our address - we’re among the people. If they’re honest for talks, we’re ready for it.”
Asked for a reaction to the Taliban Monday, Karzai’s spokesman Homayun Hamidzada said the “government’s doors are open to anyone who agrees to obey the constitution and other laws of the country to join peace.” Karzai also said Sunday the radical Hizb-i-Islami faction of former prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
But HekmatyarÂ’s spokesman, Mohammad Haroon Zarghoon, told AFP Monday the factionÂ’s position remained that it would only meet the government if the tens of thousands of international troops in Afghanistan pulled out. KarzaiÂ’s previous suggestions of negotiations have not included the leaders of the intensifying uprising and he and his spokesman did not say if the new offer extended to Hekmatyar or Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar. Both are wanted by the United States.
Karzai set up a reconciliation commission in 2005 in the hope of persuading rebels to put down their weapons. Officials say around 2,000 low-level Taliban and other militants have signed up. The Taliban has in the past two years redoubled its insurgency, which it launched after being removed from government in 2001 for not handing over its Al-Qaeda allies after the September 11 attacks on the United States.
The militants carry out almost daily attacks, with 100 suicide bombings already this year that have killed 183 Afghans and 10 international soldiers, according to the United Nations. There has been a succession of major battles in the south with the international forces backing KarzaiÂ’s government admitting to facing some of their most intense military action in decades.