WASHINGTON: More Taliban militants may be scratched from a UN sanctions list to give a spurt to peace talks in Afghanistan as Washington came out to back President Hamid Karzai’s plan to hold talks with the insurgent group.
The US indicated that it was open to removal of more Taliban militants from the blacklist with the State Department Spokesman P J Crowley saying, Washington had raised no objections to changes in the list in the past and further adjustments were “certainly possible”.
A UN panel had scratched names of 10 Taliban leaders along with 35 others belonging to affiliated groups from the sanctions terror list, after a review of 488 blacklisted names.
Crowley’s comments came as Afghanistan’s new peace council headed by former President Burnhaddin Rabani said that releasing Taliban militants held at Guantanamo Bay and removing names of the group members from UN list would boost talks aimed at ending the nine year old war.
The members of the council meeting in Kabul today said that such goodwill gestures from US and international community could spur the reconciliation talks.
Though the talks are going on at unofficial level, the peace council members suggested that these talks could be shifted to neutral locations like Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Turkmenistan.
Backing the reconciliation talks, Crowley said, “This is an Afghan-led process. We will support that process. But ultimately, you’re talking about the composition of the political structure and civil society within Afghanistan, and this is rightly decisions for the Afghan Government and Afghan people to make”.
The spokesman also said the US is willing to support removal of UN sanctions against more Taliban leaders so as to give further boost to the peace process but insisted that this should not be linked to the closer of the Guantanamo detention centre as suggested by some peace council members.
“Well, on an ongoing basis we are evaluating modifications to the individuals on the sanctions list at the UN. We’ve made some adjustments during the course of this year. And as we work through issues and in collaboration with the UN and other members of the Security Council, that is certainly possible,” he said.
In an interview to the CNN earlier, Karzai acknowledged that he was holding unofficial talks with the Taliban for quite some time and was willing to negotiate with senior Taliban leaders as soon as possible. .
“We have been talking to the Taliban as countryman to countryman talk in that manner, not as a regular official contact with the Taliban with effects to address, but rather unofficial personal contacts have been going on for quite some time. Now that the peace council has come into existence, these talks will go on and will go on officially and more rigorously, I hope,” Karzai said.
“No official contacts with a known entity that reports to a body of Taliban that comes back and reports to us regularly, that hasn’t happened yet. We hope we can begin that as soon as possible. But contacts, of course, have been there between various elements of the Afghan government at the level of community and also at political level,” Karzai said in response to a question.
The Security Council imposed sanctions against the Taliban in November 1999 for refusing to send Osama bin Laden to the US or a third country for trial on terrorism charges in two 1998 US embassy bombings in Africa.
The sanctions, a travel ban, arms embargo and assets freeze were later extended to Al Qaida, and in 2005 to affiliates and splinter groups of Al Qaida and the Taliban.
The UN completed its first review of 488 Al Qaida and Taliban names on the sanctions blacklist in early August and removed 45 individuals and entities.
–PTI
