Senior Taliban will play role in Afghan govt: British Foreign Secretary

[Naveed Yaseen]

EDINBURGH: Ending the war in Afghanistan will include senior Taliban commanders sitting in government in Kabul, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said on Tuesday.

Miliband also told a meeting of NATO’s parliamentary assembly that military action must be accompanied by a political surge to restore Afghans’ faith in their corruption-scarred government.

Miliband said the vast majority of Taliban fighters are not committed to a global jihad and can be persuaded to stop fighting. He said a settlement must also include those top Taliban commanders prepared to renounce violence.

“Once reintegration gains momentum, and the insurgency is starting to fray or crumble, we will need to support President (Hamid) Karzai in reaching out to those high-level commanders that can be persuaded to renounce Al Qaeda and pursue their goals peacefully within the constitutional framework,” Miliband said.

“This will be far from straightforward. But the historical lessons are clear. Blood enemies from the Soviet period and the civil war now work together in government. Former Talibs already sit in the parliament. It is essential that, when the time is right, members of the current insurgency are encouraged to follow suit.” Miliband said Afghanistan was not “a war without end”, and that success depended on political as well as military strategy.

He said that military strategy “must be allied to civilian effort to improve governance, especially at the local level”.

Miliband said “the Afghan people also need to see, from the appointments of Cabinet ministers and provincial governors, that there is a fresh attempt to govern in their interests”.

Miliband said good governance for Afghanistan did not mean imposing Western-style democracy, but building on “the ancient but continually evolving traditions on which the Afghan polity has existed as a stable but loose confederation for some two and a half centuries”. He also called on more support for Pakistan to help “squeeze the life out of the terrorist threat from both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border”. ap

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