Karzai - militants talk peace

Boosts hopes for reconciliation:

AFGHANISTAN: President Hamid Karzai has met delegates from Afghanistan’s second-biggest militant group and is studying their peace proposals, his spokesman said Monday, boosting hopes for reconciliation.

Hezb-e-Islami is headed by warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is blacklisted as a terrorist by the United Nations and United States. Both accuse him of carrying out attacks alongside the Taliban and of being allied to Al-Qaeda.

Karzai has been pursuing peace talks in the hope of ending the crippling Taliban-led insurgency — now in its ninth year — while the United States implements a troop surge designed to weaken the militants. It came as the UN Security Council hailed the Afghan government’s renewed bid to foster dialogue with Taliban elements who “renounce violence, break ties with terrorists and accept the Afghan constitution.” Hezb-e-Islami, known in the 1980s as a major anti-Soviet resistance force, had said it would only hold peace talks with Karzai’s government once all foreign forces had quit Afghan soil. The latest move could be seen as an early, though easy, success in the president’s reconciliation efforts. “A meeting between the Hezb-e-Islami delegation and the president took place a couple of days back,” said Karzai spokesman Waheed Omar.

“They brought with them a peace plan, a proposal, and the president is studying it,” he told AFP, adding the president had yet to respond to the plan.

A peace agreement with the group would not be of huge significance, experts said, as Hekmatyar, a former Prime Minister, has been making overtures to the Afghan political establishment for some time.

But it could remove an irritant as Karzai pursues the bigger players behind the insurgency, the Haqqani network and the Taliban’s ruling council, known as the Quetta shura, both reportedly based in Pakistan.

Hezb-e-Islami spokesman Haroon Zarghon told AFP the delegation of senior members handed Karzai a 15-point document they hoped would form the basis of peace talks.

Of the 15 points, “one of them is to set a clear timeline for the withdrawal of foreign forces and another the formation of an interim administration,” Zarghon said by telephone from an undisclosed location.

Hezb-e-Islami was passive during the 1996-2001 Taliban rule, but regrouped to launch a separate armed resistance, sharing many of the Taliban’s goals, after the latter were overthrown in the US-led 2001 invasion.

 KABUL, Tuesday, AFP