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Taliban Hint At Eventual Power Sharing In Afghanistan

June 19, 2013

by Abubakar Siddique

The Taliban has expressed its willingness to share power in Afghanistan a day after the hard-line Islamist group opened a political office in Qatar.

Mohammad Naeem, the spokesman for the Qatar office, told RFE/RL that the Taliban want to have an inclusive Afghan government.

Naeem said that the Taliban are willing to talk to Afghan President Hamid Karzai's representatives in Qatar.

Washington has welcomed the opening of the Taliban office, and President Barack Obama has defended U.S. efforts to negotiate with the radical movement.

Obama's remarks came in Berlin on June 19, hours after Karzai suspended talks with Washington on a treaty that would allow U.S. troops to remain in Afghanistan after 2014, called the Bilateral Security Agreement.

"I think that President Karzai himself recognizes the need for political reconciliation," Obama said. "The challenge is how you get those things started while you're also at war. And my hope is and expectation is that despite those challenges the process will proceed."
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Karzai said that "there is a contradiction between what the U.S. government says and what it does regarding Afghanistan peace talks."

"Foreign hands," the Afghan president warned, are behind the Taliban's new office.

He said the Afghan High Peace Council would not take part in peace talks in Qatar unless the peace process was Afghan-led.

The lower house of Afghanistan’s parliament said in a statement that it would not recognize any political office outside of Afghanistan that was not part of the Afghan government.

Known as the "Political Office of The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan," the office uses the Taliban regime's name for Afghanistan before the U.S.-led coalition ousted it in late 2001 and a UN-backed agreement brought Karzai to power.

"There were some concerns about the manner in which the Taliban opened [its office], some of the language they used," the Taliban said. "We had anticipated that at the outset there were going to be some areas of friction, to put it mildly, in getting this thing off the ground."

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/taliban-afghanistan-government-power-share/25022215.html

Copyright (c) 2013. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.