<<Brig. Butler said tribal elders got the Afghan Government to negotiate a ceasefire between British forces and the Taliban. “I told them, ‘You tell the Taliban to stop firing at us and my soldiers will stop firing back at you’,” he said. The 16-day old ceasefire was an “Afghan solution”.
“We are bidding for people’s minds,” he said. “The people here are sick of war and they are turning to the Afghan Government to end it.
“We won’t turn Afghanistan around overnight as some people believe. Moral, legal and ethical compasses of some people may be tested by this process but the repercussions of failure are too great to contemplate.”
Brig. Butler said that there had been a drop in violence. Tribal elders from other districts were negotiating with the provincial government for similar deals.
But there might be other factors, he said. The opium poppy planting season began two weeks ago and needed a lot of labour. The opium industry and Taliban vied for hired labourers from a mass of unemployed men.
Fighting also dropped in winter, when the Taliban retreated to regroup and rearm.
“I fully acknowledge that we could be being duped; that the Taliban may be buying time to reconstitute and regenerate,” Brig. Butler said. “But every day that there is no fighting, the power moves to the hands of the tribal elders who are turning to the Government for security and development. That is the glimmer of an opportunity which could be deliverable if we seize it. It is about people power and it could gain momentum.”
He said troops now would go ahead with redevelopment work.>>
thewest.com.au
On that The News reported..<<Meanwhile, it is indeed an irony that after the US and British media, as well as the US government, subjected Pakistan to scathing criticism for its "deal" with its own tribal citizens, the British military has struck a deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan, in the face of their military failures. Let us wait and see if the US media and politicians will be equally abusive of the British government and its military for making a deal with the Taliban. More rationally of course, this is a beginning which Pakistan has been suggesting for a while -- that is, there is a real need to distinguish between the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Should we now tell the British, "told you so?">>
thenews.com.pk
And today..
<<US senator says bring Taliban leadership into government
By Khalid Hasan
WASHINGTON: US Senate majority leader Bill Frist has called for the Taliban and their allies to be brought into the mainstream and made part of the government as not only are they too numerous in number but also enjoy a popular base.
Frist, now in Afghanistan on a visit, is quoted by the Associated Press correspondent, Jim Krane, in a dispatch filed from Afghanistan as saying, “You need to bring them into a more transparent type of government. And if that’s accomplished, we’ll be successful.”
The death toll in Afghanistan is mounting and so far this year, 2,800 people have been killed, 1,300 more than were killed in the same period last year.
Frist, on his first visit to the country, said that asking the Taliban to join the government was a decision to be made by President Hamid Karzai. Another senator on the trip with Frist, Mel Martinez, a Florida Republican, said negotiating with the Taliban was not “out of the question” but that fighters who refused to join the political process would have to be defeated. “A political solution is how it’s all going to be solved,” he added.
Frist expressed the hope that the US would be able pull out its forces from Afghanistan soon, but added that 20,000 American troops were still needed to support NATO, which will soon assume direct control over most military operations, the news agency reported. “We’re going to stay here a long time,” he said. He suggested that the only way to win in areas such as southern Afghanistan was to “assimilate people who call themselves Taliban into a larger, more representative government. Approaching counterinsurgency by winning hearts and minds will ultimately be the answer. Military vs insurgency one-to-one does not sound like it can be won. It sounds to me that the Taliban is everywhere.”
Frist and Martinez are also going to visit Pakistan and Iraq.
Meanwhile, NATO in Afghanistan appears to have followed the example set by Pakistan, which signed a peace deal with tribal elders in North Waziristan. British NATO troops have reached a similar type of agreement with Afghan tribal elders to end Taliban attacks in a southern district of the country.
Under the deal signed in Musa Qila in Helmand province, British troops will not launch offensives and in return the tribal leaders will press the Taliban to stop their attacks, reports Reuters from Kabul. “If we are not attacked, we have no reason to initiate offensive operations. The tribal leaders are using their influence on the Taliban,” according to NATO spokesman Mark Laity.
Laity clarified – in the same way that Pakistan has done more than once – that the understanding had been reached with tribal elders, not with the Taliban. Another similarity with the North Waziristan agreement signed by Pakistan is that like the Pakistan army, the British troops deployed in the area will stay. According to the report, “Efforts are underway elsewhere to end the violence by involving chiefs of the fiercely independent and conservative Pashtun tribes. Pakistan and Afghanistan, at odds over Afghan complaints that the Taliban receive help in Pakistan, have agreed to hold tribal councils on both sides of the border to discuss security.”>> |
