Email
Print
ShareLondon: Amid increasing demand that the Afghan government check the surge in militancy, president Hamid Karzai is under renewed pressure from Britain to negotiate with Taliban as part of a major reconciliation effort, a news report has said.
British officials have proposed that "reconciled Talibs" should be removed from the UN sanctions list as part of a major attempt at reconciliation, according to a leaked Foreign Office memo.
"We must weaken and divide the Taliban if we are to reduce the insurgency to a level that can be managed and contained by the Afghan security forces," the Guardian quoted the memo as saying.
"This can be achieved by a combination of military pressure and clear signals that the option of an honourable exit from the fight exists," it adds.
The reconciliation attempt is strongly backed by the British Foreign Office -- notably Sherard Cowper-Coles, the government's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan -- by MI6, and by Lieutenant General Graeme Lamb, former head of the SAS and Britain's senior military officer in Kabul, the British daily said.
More than 100,000 Nato and US-led troops are helping the embattled government battle a Taliban insurgency at its deadliest since US-led troops toppled the Islamist regime eight years ago and Karzai was swept into power.
Lamb, who was deployed to Afghanistan with the task of persuading insurgents to give up their arms, believes many young and rank-and-file Taliban fighters carry a sense of "anger and grievances that have not been addressed".
