Talking to the Taliban | 29 January 2010

After the London conference, it is clear that “talking to the Taliban” will become part of the strategy in Afghanistan. But the conference left a number of important questions about what this means in practice unanswered.

Talking to the Taliban is not a new idea. Even though he expelled a British and Irish diplomat for holding secret talks with Taliban in December 2007, President Karzai has become an advocate for such negotiations over the last two years. In the Spring of 2009, Saudi Arabia hosted tentative negotiations between Karzai’s representatives and former Taliban, with links to the current movement.

But the idea now has a head of steam behind it. In London, Karzai won further financial support for a new peace conference to reach out to “disenchanted brothers” who have fought in the insurgency. The morning after the conference, a front page report in the The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/28/taliban-united-nations-afghanistan claimed that Kai Eide, the UN special representative in the country, had already met regional commanders from the Taliban’s leadership council, the Quetta Shura, in Dubai on 8 January.