Kai Eide's take on the Taliban

Pakistan arrests halt secret UN contacts with Taliban
By Lyse Doucet BBC News, Oslo
I thought I would post this update by Lyse, one of the best in the game.

The UN's former envoy to Afghanistan, Kai Eide,(pictured above) has strongly criticised Pakistan's recent arrest of high-ranking Taliban leaders.
Mr Eide told the BBC the arrests had completely stopped a channel of secret communications with the UN.
Pakistani officials insist the arrests were not an attempt to spoil talks.
Mr Eide confirmed publicly for the first time that his secret contacts with senior Taliban members had begun a year ago.
This has to be an Afghan process
He said they involved face-to-face talks in Dubai and elsewhere.
"The first contact was probably last spring, then of course you moved into the election process where there was a lull in activity, and then communication picked up when the election process was over, and it continued to pick up until a certain moment a few weeks ago," he said.
Mr Eide said there were now many channels of communication with the Taliban, including those involving senior representatives of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Speaking at his home outside the Norwegian capital Oslo, Mr Eide would not comment on these other channels.

Mr Eide described contacts with the Taliban as being "in the early stages... talks about talks".
He cautioned that it would take weeks, months or even longer to establish confidence, on both sides, to move forward, and to establish the "red lines" in any process.
A senior Afghan adviser to President Karzai recently told me that their contacts with the Taliban had also accelerated in recent months. He also said the arrests had affected this process.
There has been intense speculation about why Pakistan moved against what are believed to be about a dozen leading members of the Taliban movement in recent weeks.
"The effect of [the arrests], in total, certainly, was negative on our possibilities to continue the political process that we saw as so necessary at that particular juncture," Mr Eide said.
"The Pakistanis did not play the role that they should have played.... They must have known who they were, what kind of role they were playing, and you see the result today."
In an interview this week, Pakistan's military spokesman, Gen Athar Abbas, denied Pakistan had moved against these Taliban to stop any talks.
US officials have recently praised what they called a new co-operation by Pakistan.
'Senior figures'
Mr Eide was giving his first interview since ending his two-year mission this month.
Asked how high up his contacts were, Mr Eide said: "We met senior figures in the Taliban leadership and we also met people who have the authority of the Quetta Shura to engage in that kind of discussion."
The Taliban leadership council, often referred to as the Quetta Shura, takes its name from the Pakistani city of Quetta where senior Taliban are widely believed to have been based. Pakistan denies its existence in Quetta and says Taliban leaders go back and forth across their porous border.
As for the involvement of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, Mr Eide said: "I find it unthinkable that such contact would take place without his knowledge and also without his acceptance."
His revelations seem to confirm a growing view that at least certain members of the Taliban movement are now open to discussing a negotiated end to the war. But Mr Eide said he believed there were still disagreements.
There is also still no consensus among Afghanistan and its foreign allies about if, and how, to engage with a movement many of whose senior members are still linked to al-Qaeda.
The outgoing UN envoy, whose tenure was marked by controversy over a deeply tainted presidential election, said he hoped the upcoming "peace jirga" called by President Karzai in Kabul would help build the kind of agreement necessary to reach a consensus on the way forward.
Mr Eide said he believed it was the only way to end the war, and stressed: "This has to be an Afghan process."


RECENT TALIBAN ARRESTS
04 March 2010: Senior Afghan Taliban leader Agha Jan Mohtasim reportedly arrested in Karachi
23 February: Senior Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Kabir reportedly held in North West Frontier Province
19 February: Two senior Afghan Taliban leaders, Mullah Abdul Salam and Mullah Mir Mohammad reportedly detained in Pakistan
17 February: Pakistan confirms arrest of Afghan Taliban second-in-command Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar in Karachi

Afghanistan's Soviet remnants

Lyse Doucet worked for the BBC in the late 1980s for the BBC in Afghanistan and has been one of my favourite journalists over the years as she is able to drill deep and get the story behind the story. I rate her alongside Christiane Amanpour from CNN who I met a number of times in 1993-96 in Afghanistan. I got to know Lyse a little after 9/11 when she was covering from the BBC from Islamabad where I was based for some time.










My two favourite war correspondents who covered Afghanistan, Lyse (l) and Christiane (r)

Here is a superb story that appeared recently on the BBC website written by by Lyse Doucet.


Ahmad and Nek Mohammad: Little betrays their Ukrainian past

It took a call to an Afghan military commander, a chat with a police chief, a nod to a governor, and tea with a spook but we were finally given permission to pass through the gates to the Friendship Bridge linking northern Afghanistan to the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan.

On the plain white bridge spanning the Amu Darya river, only a lone car rolled by every few minutes or so.

And then, a freight train came thundering down the rails, shattering an eerie quiet, allowing us to imagine a time centuries ago when mighty armies invaded across this border.

From Alexander the Great to the 19th Century Great Game, this has been the edge of empire.

Three decades ago, the Soviet Red Army came across this bridge.

Then, in 1989, the last of 100,000 soldiers rumbled the other way in an armoured column.

They left behind a country in ruin and returned home to a Soviet empire on the verge of collapse.

Some 15,000 Red Army soldiers lost their lives and more than a million Afghans were killed in a Cold War confrontation between a Soviet-backed government in Kabul and mujahideen fighters armed by the West and Islamic neighbours.

'If I hadn't converted they would have killed me'

The Soviet commander, Gen Boris Gromov, a decorated war hero, was the last to cross this bridge in a carefully choreographed farewell.

In Moscow, a foreign ministry spokesman announced "not a single Soviet soldier was left in Afghanistan".

I was based in Kabul then and watched the troops go. But ever since then, I've heard stories of the ones that never left.

Twenty years on, in the north-eastern town of Kunduz, I met Private Alexander Levenets and Gennady Tseuma, two village boys from Ukraine, former teenage conscripts.

The Afghan war turned their lives inside out. Alexander became Ahmad. Gennady is Nek Mohammad. But fate dealt them each a different hand.

Hatred

Alexander deserted his unit to escape the brutality of his Russian officers.

As we walked through a depot of rusting Soviet weaponry in Kunduz, he remembered his walk into the darkness one night, believing he faced certain death.


Some 15,000 Red Army soldiers lost their lives

The Russians had warned - anyone who surrendered would be tortured by the mujahideen.

But instead they took him in. He eventually converted to Islam and fought his former Russian comrades.

"I had hatred toward them and treated them as they had treated me."

Gennady was taken prisoner by a different mujahedeen group and forced to choose between conversion or death.

A quarter of a century on, little betrays their Ukrainian past. To all appearances, they are Afghan Muslims with their traditional shalwar kameez - tunic and trousers - and greying beards.


Some 15,000 Red Army soldiers lost their lives

Among the "Afghantsy" - the Soviet soldiers who fought in this war - a small number deserted or were taken prisoner.

A few were honoured as special Muslims when the Taleban came to power. Some have gone back to their old homes.

Emotional reunion

Ahmad, with his gentle bearing and embroidered Muslim cap, wants to put the past behind him.

"I don't remember anything from Ukraine. There's nothing left for me there." His mother and only brother are now dead.

He drives a white estate taxi to support his wife and four daughters.


"I have no regrets," he says with a smile as his daughters play Afghan hopscotch in the fading light of day inside their walled compound.

In this conservative Afghan culture, his wife remained out of sight.

Nek Mohammad also has four children and an Afghan wife he married when she was just a young teenager.

But there is also Sergei - a brother who was only 11 when he left for the front.

In the past few weeks, Sergei managed to collect money and courage to visit.

As we sat on cushions, in Afghan custom, on a carpeted floor, Nek Mohammad recalled their emotional reunion.

"Sergei said, what happened to you? See what has fate done to us."


'I deserted the Soviets to fight for the mujahideen'

Sergei wants him to come home. Nek Mohammad is torn. "I wanted to go but my wife's family did not let her. My children are sweet. I could not leave them."

When Nek Mohammad turns on his satellite television to listen to Russian music, the women cavorting on screen offend Ahmad, who averts his gaze.

Nek Mohammad watches with a wry smile. "We never used to have that kind of stuff."

Their lives were changed forever by this war. But so was the fate of an entire country when the Soviet Union invaded to prop up an unpopular government in Kabul begging for help.

"It was a mistake," admitted Russia's Ambassador in Kabul, Zamir Kabulov, when we visit the memorial to Moscow's dead on the far edge of their gleaming new embassy in Kabul.

He was a young diplomat during the Soviet occupation and has spent almost all his career in Afghanistan.

Now he has a stark warning for the West.

"Tragedy is being repeated again. I feel that the Americans and other partners waging a war on terror have neglected historical lessons."

Ambassador Kabulov often speaks with some barely concealed satisfaction over the plight of former Cold War rivals. That annoys Western diplomats who dismiss history lectures from Moscow.

In 2001, when US and British led troops helped topple the Taleban, they were welcomed as liberators, not occupiers. It was hailed as a new start.

But as the Taleban advance close to Kabul, and civilian casualties mount from errant US and Nato air strikes, Afghans ask why the countries who came to help are now failing them.

But Nato governments are urgently reviewing their strategies. An extra 17,000 US troops are being deployed.

The Cold War railway relic on the northern border will soon help to bring in Nato supplies as it steps up its Afghan campaign.

Tragedy is being repeated again. I feel that the Americans and other partners waging a war on terror have neglected historical lessons

Zamir Kabulov,
Russian ambassador