Seeking progress toward ending the grinding conflict in Afghanistan, an international conference yesterday planned to offer funds to lure Taliban fighters to renounce violence and draft a timetable to hand over security responsibilities to local forces.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai was to address delegates from about 70 nations in London, seeking to win new international support after more than eight years of combat that is threatening to exhaust public good will in the West.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen were to join talks that were expected to set targets to transfer security control of several Afghan provinces to the local police and military by the end of this year.
In return for their continued backing, Afghanistan’s allies would demand strict foreign monitoring of efforts to root out government corruption following the country’s fraud-marred elections last year.
“We will be trying our very best to be ready to defend the major part of our country from two to three years — and when we reach the five-year end point, that’s when we would be leading,” Karzai said on Wednesday, following talks with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
He envisages Afghanistan’s government taking control of security in all 34 provinces by 2015.
International allies would pledge around US$500 million for Karzai’s program to lure Taliban soldiers back into mainstream society.
Western diplomats said the plans would not involve cash inducements, but instead fund jobs in the country’s police and army, or in agriculture — and pay for housing.
US special representative Richard Holbrooke said many low and mid-level Taliban fighters were motivated by financial need, rather than ideological support for the Taliban or al-Qaeda.
He said negotiations with higher ranking insurgents were unlikely, although other Western officials said that, over the longer term, the program may eventually target leadership figures.
Zalmay Rasoul, the incoming Afghan foreign minister, said on the eve of yesterday’s conference that the program aims to target Taliban members who were tired of fighting.
“Every war will finish some time, and we are targeting those people who are tired and sick of fighting,” he said on Wednesday.
He added that fighters who weren’t linked with al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups would be offered the chance to have a decent life and reintegrate into mainstream society.
Some officials suspect Karzai hopes to eventually bring some Pakistan-based leaders of the Afghan Taliban into the political process — if they agree to renounce violence.
“To weaken the Taliban you divide them and offer those people who are prepared to renounce violence and join the democratic process a way out,” Karzai said in London, addressing a panel of British and Afghan students in Brown’s Downing Street residence.
The Taliban has dismissed the plan, saying in a statement posted to their Web site on Wednesday that their fighters wouldn’t be swayed by financial incentives.
Talks in London have been called in hope of plotting an eventual exit from Afghanistan for Western nations amid rising military casualties and growing public disquiet.
British Member of Parliament Paul Flynn said that a focus on a political settlement and reintegration of Taliban fighters would mark significantly scaled down Western ambitions.
“Someone has to break through the delusion of possible military victory,” Flynn said.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel told lawmakers in Berlin the conference would define concrete targets for building up Afghan security forces and “developing a strategy for a responsible handover.”
“We have no illusions regarding certain notions of democracy according to our criteria — such notions probably would be presumptuous in view of the country’s history and tradition,” Merkel said.
The talks, at a grand Georgian town house in central London, would also consider sluggish reconstruction programs and work to tackle drug trafficking.
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