A 10-MAN delegation from Hamid Karzai’s high peace council has flown to the Turkish capital to ask Ankara to host embryonic political contacts with the Taliban.
The council will ask Turkey to host a “Taliban office” or negotiating base where Taliban envoys would be free to meet representatives of Mr Karzai’s government.
Opening such an office would stop short of official recognition of the insurgents, but would show that Kabul and the West were serious about negotiation, sources told The Irish Times.
The initiative coincides with a significant shift in United States policy away from pursuing an outright military victory toward also negotiating with the Taliban.
US secretary of state Hillary Clinton last week signalled an “intensified diplomatic push” to complement the surge of 30,000 reinforcements President Barack Obama sent to the country 15 months ago.
Members of the 68-strong peace council believe they can coax the insurgent high command to negotiations with a series of “confidence-building measures”.
Earlier this month, it was disclosed that the Taliban had requested that the US release Khairullah Khairkhwa, a former high-ranking Taliban official held in Guantánamo prison. The council will send a delegation to talk to prisoners at the jail.
Mullah Arsala Rahmani, a former Taliban minister and senior member of the council, said negotiations needed a base in a Muslim country outside Afghanistan’s immediate powerful neighbours.
“There should be a place people can go to, an office or an address where they can talk,” he said. “This should be in a country which does not have a stake in the talks, unlike Pakistan or Iran. Our favourite candidates at the moment are Istanbul or Ashgabat [in Turkmenistan].”
He suggested other measures would include guaranteeing envoys safe passage and removing the Taliban high command from a United Nations sanctions list, which has frozen assets and barred Taliban members from international travel.
However, it remained unclear whether the Taliban was willing to negotiate at all. Publicly, it has rejected any talks while Nato troops remain in Afghanistan.
One Western official said: “The Taliban want dignity and it [an office] is a way to allow them to feel they have that and they are not just being treated as terrorists.
“It’s really, really early and I think people are just looking to see what happens. At the moment, Turkey it is not saying no, but it is being very cautious. I don’t think this initiative has come from them.”
The idea of a Taliban office in Turkey was first raised in December on an official visit by Mr Karzai. At that time he said: “If Turkey provides such a venue, we, as the government, as the state [of Afghanistan], will be pleased to walk on the path that Turkey has opened.”
Turkish officials stressed the idea had been hypothetical.
Gulf states including Saudi Arabia have been reluctant to host similar offices, fearing the reaction of their own radical groups if they were perceived to be helping Nato or the US.
The council delegation, led by former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, left for Ankara on Tuesday and would not divulge its agenda for the four-day mission.
It will meet Abdullah Gul, the Turkish president and Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister. The Turkish embassy in Kabul declined to comment.
Mrs Clinton said US diplomacy aimed to help the Afghan government deal with Taliban who renounced al-Qaeda.
“I know that reconciling with an adversary that can be as brutal as the Taliban sounds distasteful, even unimaginable,” she said, “and diplomacy would be easy if we only had to talk to our friends, but that is not how one makes peace.”