US backs Karzai’s offer to Taliban

BERLIN—The United States backs Kabul’s offer to hold peace talks with the Taliban but believes negotiations with the radical “hard core” in Afghanistan would be hopeless, a senior US official said Tuesday. The deputy head of the European and Eurasian Affairs office at the State Department, Kurt Volker, said Washington welcomed President Hamid Karzai’s bid to sit down with radical Afghan groups, as long as they rejected violence.
“We don’t want there to be continuing warfare or conflict in Afghanistan. For that to happen, reconciliation is an important part of the mix,” Volker told reporters during a visit to Berlin. “Those who formerly were fighters who want to return to society ought to be able to do so. Those who are tribal leaders whose communities were supporting the Taliban at one point could turn and support the central government.” Volker said it was crucial to offer incentives to former insurgents.
“I think for the government of Afghanistan and President Karzai to want to reach out and work with people who renounce violence, who want to support the central government, who will support human rights, who will build peace and security and development in the country — that’s reconciliation, that’s an important thing for the Afghan government to do and we support that.” But he warned against lowering the bar for an invitation to the negotiating table. “There is a hard core in Afghanistan, people who don’t believe in those things, people who don’t want to see Afghanistan succeed, people who don’t believe in human rights, who want to reimpose a very dark regime on Afghanistan and they are willing to use brutal, violence means to do that,” he said.
“You can’t negotiate with that kind of person — they’re aimed at a physical destruction of the country.” Karzai on Saturday made a direct offer of talks with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar and radical warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, both of whom are wanted by Washington, even holding out the prospect of government posts if they gave up violence.
Both have rejected talks as long as there are foreign troops in Afghanistan. There are currently about 50,000, mainly Western soldiers in the country. The insurgency has claimed around 5,000 lives so far this year, most of them of rebels, compared with about 4,000 last year. The Taliban launched their uprising after regrouping following their ouster from government in late 2001 in a US-led invasion.
A mother and her two children boarded a police bus only seconds before a suicide bomber detonated his payload inside, an attack that killed 13 police and civilians Tuesday, the second such bombing in Afghanistan’s capital in four days, police and witnesses said.
Four children were among the 13 killed by a man wearing a pakul — an Afghan hat commonly worn in the country’s north — and a shawl around the upper half of his body called a chador, said witness Amin Gul, who owns a metal-working shop next to the blast site.
“When the bus came, an old man got on, then a woman with two children, then the guy wearing the chador entered, and then a big boom,” said Gul. Ten people were wounded in the attack. The seats in the front of the bus were covered in blood and small body parts, and the vehicle’s roof was blasted away, leaving a crumpled hulk of bent metal. Ahmad Saqi, a 20-year-old mechanic, said he helped put seven people in vehicles for runs to the hospital, and that several of the wounded had no legs. “One woman was holding a baby in her arms, and they were both killed,” Saqi said.—Agencies