Report: U.S. diplomats meeting with Taliban’s “moderate” Afghan allies

They are, after all, our partners in peace.

Mullah Mutawakkil, once a confidant of the one-eyed Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, was held at a US base in Kandahar in 2002 after he gave himself up to American troops.

Now he is being politely wooed by a stream of senior US officials who make discreet visits to his villa, which is guarded by armed police, to hear his thoughts on what the Taliban mood is like and whether any of its leaders are ready for talks…

Taliban leaders are looking for guarantees of their personal safety from the US, and a removal of the “bounties” placed on the head of their top commanders. They also want a programme for the release of prisoners held at the notorious Bagram US air base in Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay.

In return, he says, the Taliban would promise not to allow Afghanistan to be used to plan attacks on America – the original reason for American invervention, and the overriding aim of US policy in the region…

As one of the few senior Taliban figures to be reconciled to the new Afghan way of government, he is in touch by telephone with old comrades who are still fighting. His contacts with officials from the US Embassy in Kabul and from the office of US special envoy Richard Holbrooke have increased in recent weeks.

Another Taliban crony who’s now an Afghan senator claims that only a minority of the group are true jihadist nutballs and that most are simply fighting to liberate Afghanistan from occupation. That was true of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq — if it wasn’t, the Anbar awakening would have been impossible — but is it really true of the Taliban? You already know the answer if you read Roggio’s analysis a few weeks ago when the White House first started whispering that the Taliban’s no longer an implacable enemy, but here’s a bit more from NYT reporter David Rohde, who spent seven months as a Taliban hostage. Quote:

Over those months, I came to a simple realization. After seven years of reporting in the region, I did not fully understand how extreme many of the Taliban had become. Before the kidnapping, I viewed the organization as a form of “Al Qaeda lite,” a religiously motivated movement primarily focused on controlling Afghanistan.

Living side by side with the Haqqanis’ followers, I learned that the goal of the hard-line Taliban was far more ambitious. Contact with foreign militants in the tribal areas appeared to have deeply affected many young Taliban fighters. They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with Al Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world.

If Mutawakkil’s right that the Taliban’s willing to dump AQ, there’s a very easy way they can prove it. Exit question: The Afghan senator claims that a majority of the Quetta shura, the Taliban’s leadership council, is ready for talks — but not Mullah Omar, which presumably makes negotiations impossible. In which case, why are we even debating this?

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