Insurgent Faction Presents Afghan Peace Plan

Insurgent Faction Presents Afghan Peace Plan
By CARLOTTA GALL
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: March 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/world/asia/24afghan.html?th&emc=th


KABUL, Afghanistan — Representatives of a major insurgent faction have presented a formal 15-point peace plan to the Afghan government, the first concrete proposal to end hostilities since President Hamid Karzai said he would make reconciliation a priority after his re-election last year.

The delegation represents fighters loyal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, 60, one of the most brutal of Afghanistan’s former resistance fighters who leads a part of the insurgency against American, NATO and Afghan forces in the north and northeast of the country.

His representatives met Monday with President Karzai and other Afghan officials in the first formal contact between a major insurgent group and the Afghan government after almost two years of backchannel communications, which diplomats say the United States has supported.

Though the insurgent group, Hezb-i-Islami, or Islamic Party, operates under a separate command from the Taliban, it has links to the Taliban leadership and Al Qaeda and has fought on a common front against foreign forces in Afghanistan.

A spokesman for the delegation, Mohammad Daoud Abedi, said the Taliban, which makes up the bulk of the insurgency, would be willing to go along with the plan if a date was set for the withdrawal of foreign forces from the country. Publicly, a Taliban spokesman denied that.

The plan, titled the National Rescue Agreement, a copy of which was given to The New York Times, sets that date as July 2010, with the withdrawal to be completed within six months.

Those dates are ahead of the schedule outlined by President Obama, who set a target of July 2011 to start drawing down American troops. But the representatives said the dates were a starting position and could change.

“This is a start, this is not the word of the Koran that we cannot change it,” Mr. Abedi said.

Despite the Taliban’s hard-line public statement, he also said he was confident that the Taliban would be willing to countenance the plan.

“They have said if the U.S. announces a withdrawal date, they are ready to support our plan,” said Mr. Abedi, an Afghan-American businessman. “I promise that personally, this is my own connection and I personally promise that. I have said that to the U.S. all along.”

A spokesman for the Taliban said, however, that they had had nothing to do with the Hezb-i-Islami plan and would not accept such conditions.

“What we want is expulsion of foreign occupation forces unconditionally,” the spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, said when contacted by telephone. “They have to leave Afghanistan now, and no condition is acceptable for us.”

An American Embassy spokesman said the United States supported Mr. Karzai’s effort to reach out to members of the Taliban and Hezb-i-Islami through a reconciliation process, as long as the insurgents accepted the Afghan Constitution, renounced violence and renounced links to Al Qaeda and other insurgents.

“Our policy is that it is an Afghan-led process, and we completely support reintegration and reconciliation,” said the spokesman, Brendan O’Brien.

Members of Hezb-i-Islami have held meetings with State Department officials, who have urged the Afghans to make peace among themselves if they want American troops to withdraw, said Mr. Abedi, the spokesman for the delegation.

Mr. O’Brien said American officials would not be meeting with the Hezb-i-Islami delegation while it was in Kabul, but diplomats here have said that the United States gave the green light for Mr. Karzai to open contacts with Mr. Hekmatyar nearly two years ago.

The Hezb-i-Islami proposal, while categorical about the demand for foreign forces to leave Afghanistan, and to end military operations and detentions, goes some way toward meeting the demands of Western nations and the Afghan government on other issues.

It accepts having the current government to stay in power, and having the Afghan police, army and intelligence services assume responsibility for security, while a seven-member national security council is formed as the ultimate decision-making body until foreign forces leave and new elections are held.

A future elected parliament would have the right to review the Constitution, and the Afghan courts would prosecute those accused of corruption, drug smuggling, theft of the national wealth, and war crimes.

Although the provision is not stated in the document, Mr. Abedi said his party wanted international assistance for rebuilding Afghanistan to continue, and for the United Nations and the Organization of the Islamic Conference to help broker the peace.

The plan also declares that no foreign fighters would be present in the country after the departure of the international forces, a wording unlikely to please Western countries concerned about the influence of Al Qaeda and other foreign militant groups.

Mr. Abedi, a former fighter, said his party had no links with Al Qaeda, nor did it need to make use of foreign fighters. But Mr. Hekmatyar is named on the United Nations sanctions list of Taliban and Al Qaeda figures.

In drafting the document and sending his envoys, Mr. Hekmatyar was responding to Mr. Karzai’s offer of peace talks as well as to the messages from President Obama’s administration that it wanted to withdraw forces and end the war, Mr. Abedi said.

Pakistan, which has long been a supporter of Mr. Hekmatyar’s bid for power in Afghanistan, has been demanding a role in negotiations between the insurgents and the Afghan government.

Mr. Abedi emphasized that Hezb-i-Islami was putting its plan to the government to establish a stable transition when foreign troops left and prevent the chaos and infighting that occurred after the departure of the Soviet troops and the collapse of the Communist government in the 1990s.

“We want, this time, the departure of international forces to be organized so they leave something behind after they leave and not to destroy what is achieved now,” he said. “This is the goal. We want to have this government in its position and we are ready to assist them with the security situation.”

The delegation met with Mr. Karzai and his brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, who is a powerful figure in southern Afghanistan. It also met separately with figures from the northern opposition movement, longtime opponents of Mr. Hekmatyar: the Parliament speaker, Younus Qanooni; a lawmaker, Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf; and Vice President Marshall Mohammad Qasim Fahim.

Mr. Abedi described their reception in Kabul as “fabulous” and said “the president was very, very gentle, very, very friendly.”

Politicians familiar with Mr. Hekmatyar warned that any agreement would be a long way off. Yet the document clearly had Mr. Hekmatyar’s fingers all over it, said Daoud Sultanzoi, a member of Parliament who met with Mr. Hekmatyar’s delegation on Tuesday.

“The gist of the whole is very important,” he said. “He senses a fatigue in American and European public opinion and he is seizing on that,” he said.



Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting from Kabul.