BY MOHAMMAD SHOEB
DOHA: Afghan President Hamid Karzai yesterday confirmed that talks on opening a Taliban office in Qatar will be held here today.
“We will hopefully discuss the issue of Taliban office in Qatar tomorrow,” the visiting leader told reporters at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel yesterday.
The opening of a Taliban office here would make it easier to hold negotiations for a peace process to end more than a decade of war in Afghanistan.
Until earlier this year, Karzai had not agreed to the idea of opening a Taliban office in Qatar as he feared that his government would be sidelined in talks between the militants and the United States.
Karzai, who is on a two-day visit to Qatar, was welcomed at the Doha International Airport by Qatar’s Minister of State H E Abdullah bin Khalifa Al Attiyah.
Asked to shed some light on his visit to Qatar and his scheduled meeting today with the Emir, H H Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, he said: “It will be a successful and happy trip….”
According to earlier reports, Taliban leaders have refused to have direct contact with Karzai, saying he is a puppet of Washington, which supported his rise to power after a US-led military operation oust the Taliban from power following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
However, with Nato-led forces due to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, Karzai recently changed his mind and agreed to the proposed Taliban office in Doha, and is slated to firm up the plan today with the Emir.
The president said there were about 150,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, of which 15,000 would stay and the rest would leave the country by the end of 2014, but added that the US had no plan to completely leave Afghanistan in the near future.
However, any future peace talks face numerous hurdles before they begin, including confusion over who would represent the Taliban and Karzai’s insistence that his appointees be at the centre of negotiations.
Meanwhile, before Karzai left Kabul, his spokesman Aimal Faizi was quoted as saying: “We will discuss the peace process, of course, and the opening of an office for the Taliban in Qatar.”
“If we want to have talks to bring peace to Afghanistan, the main side must be the Afghan government’s representatives — the High Peace Council, which has members from all the country’s ethnic and political backgrounds,” Faizi added.
THE PENINSULA
