Taliban rejects Afghan peace talks offer

The Taliban has officially announced that it will not participate in peace talks. Representatives from Afghanistan, China, Pakistan and the US, have been meeting to prepare the ground for talks, and in February invited the Taliban and other militant elements to enter into dialogue. In a statement released on 5 March, the Taliban announced: “We reject all such rumours and unequivocally state that the leader of Islamic Emirate [the Taliban’s self-proclaimed title] has not authorised anyone to participate in this meeting.” The situation has cast doubt over the current attempts to bring the Islamist extremist group, in all its factions, back to the talks table.

The Taliban has said it will not take part in peace talks brokered by representatives of Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and the United States, casting doubt on efforts to revive negotiations.

Ousted from power in a US-led military intervention in 2001, the group has been waging a violent insurgency to try to topple Afghanistan’s western-backed government and re-establish a fundamentalist Islamic regime.

Following a meeting of the Quadrilateral Coordination Group made up of representatives of the four countries in Kabul in February, officials said they expected direct peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban to begin in early March.

But the Taliban, which calls itself the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, denied it would be participating in any forthcoming talks in Islamabad. “We reject all such rumours and unequivocally state that the leader of Islamic Emirate has not authorised anyone to participate in this meeting,” the group said on Saturday.

“[Islamic Emirate] once again reiterates that unless the occupation of Afghanistan is ended, blacklists eliminated and innocent prisoners freed, such futile misleading negotiations will not bear any results,” it added.

The rejection follows efforts to revive talks that broke down last year after the announcement of the death of the Taliban’s founder and long-time leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, about two years earlier.

The US State Department called on the Islamist movement to come to the negotiating table, saying Afghanistan’s allies would continue to back the Kabul government as it fights the insurgency.

“The Taliban have a choice: to join good-faith negotiations for peace, or continue to fight a war in which they are killing their fellow Afghans and destroying their country,” it said in a statement.

“If they choose the latter course, they will continue to face the combined efforts of the Afghan security forces and their international partners.”

Mullah Akhtar Mansour, the Taliban’s new leader, has laid down preconditions for taking part in any talks as he struggles to overcome factional infighting, with some breakaway groups opposing any negotiations whatsoever.

Heavy fighting has continued over the winter from Helmand in the south to Jowzjan province in the north, while a series of suicide attacks have been launched in the capital, underlining the difficulty of restarting the peace process.