Petraeus: Taliban Reaching Out to Karzai
The New York Times reports:
The top American commander in Afghanistan said Monday that high-level Taliban leaders had reached out to senior Afghan government officials in the context of starting reconciliation discussions that could pave the way to end the fighting in Afghanistan.
For months, efforts at reconciliation have been stalled at every level, and this is the first explicit public suggestion that there is extensive behind-the-scenes contact between insurgents and the Afghan government.
Gen. David H. Petraeus, in a meeting with reporters after a tour of the United States-run Detention Facility here, where American forces detain Afghans they suspect of supporting the insurgency, said the Taliban were making efforts to establish contact with senior members of the Afghan government .
“There are very high-level Taliban leaders who have sought to reach out to the highest levels of the Afghan government and, indeed, have done that,” General Petraeus said.
The conditions of President Hamid Karzai “are very clear, very established, and, certainly, we support them as we did in Iraq, as the U.K. did in Northern Ireland; this is how you end these kinds of insurgencies,” he said, referring to the conditions among others that the Taliban respect the country’s Constitution and lay down arms.
He added that any strategy had to be comprehensive and also include traditional elements of counterinsurgency strategy, such as training Afghan security force members, and also “coming to grips with the situation in which there are sanctuaries for the insurgents outside the borders of the country in which we are located, and it involves, in a sense, a war of words, of information,” he said.
American support for the process is in part a recognition that “Oh, by the way, you are not going to kill or capture your way out of an industrial-strength insurgency,” General Petraeus said, underscoring the scale of Taliban activity.
The talks are continuous, according to people knowledgeable about them.
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