BERLIN, Aug. 20 (UPI) -- Should the West negotiate with moderate elements inside the Taliban? While the question currently divides the German government, it surfaced Monday that a team of German intelligence officials in 2005 secretly met with two Taliban representatives.
Zurich, July 2005. A limousine with darkened windows drives from the airport to the nearby Hilton Hotel. In the car, two agents of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, and two Afghan men dressed in long green robes, a big turban on each head. The BND has booked a suite for the men, where they would stay for three days, engaged in talks with the German intelligence officials.
The Afghan men who traveled to Zurich that summer were senior representatives of the Taliban, German news magazine Der Spiegel said in its latest issue, which hit newsstands Monday.
The report comes as security in Afghanistan is deteriorating, with several observers calling for a strategy change in Afghanistan to prevent the country from sliding into the same chaotic situation as Iraq.
The German government has been engaged in discussions about whether the West should negotiate with moderate elements inside the Taliban, a group the United Nations brands a terrorist organization and that fosters strong ties with al-Qaida. Last week the Taliban claimed responsibility for a roadside bomb that killed three German soldiers.
Also last week, however, deputy government spokesman Thomas Steg, of the center-left Social Democratic Party, or SPD, said the West should engage “moderate, reasonable” members of the Taliban interested in reconstruction and reconciliation in a dialog.
Earlier this year Steg’s party boss, SPD head Kurt Beck, proposed inviting the Taliban to a new Afghanistan peace conference. At the time, the proposal was praised only by a handful of experts, while Chancellor Angela Merkel and her entire center-right Christian Democratic Union criticized Beck.
The echoes this time were similar: Conservative foreign policy lawmaker Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg said Steg and Beck were the only ones who apparently had met “reasonable Taliban,” and CDU foreign policy expert Ruprecht Polenz said negotiating with the Taliban would undermine the moral justification of Germany’s engagement in Afghanistan.
Germany has roughly 3,000 soldiers stationed with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, mainly in northern Afghanistan, where the Germans are leading reconstruction efforts.
Over the past year support for the German Afghanistan contribution has drastically deteriorated in light of a rising number of German casualties linked to roadside bombings, skirmishes and kidnappings -- that’s why some SPD officials are calling for a dialog with the Taliban.
According to Der Spiegel, the SPD is referring to studies of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, or SWP, a Berlin-based think tank that in the past has advised Berlin on foreign policy issues. Non-ideological Pashtun fighters may be influenced to join the reconstruction efforts, the studies say, according to Der Spiegel.
Part of a new strategy in Afghanistan may be to "speak to a selected group inside the Taliban," Markus Kaim, security expert at the SWP, recently told German news channel n-tv. "But you shouldn’t think that all security issues in Afghanistan can be solved that way."
The BND definitely has experience dealing with morally questionable organizations; in the past it has negotiated with Hezbollah officials over prisoner releases and has talked to officials from the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian party remembered mainly for the deaths of an estimated 1.5 million people (estimates range from 850,000 to 3 million) under its regime, through execution, starvation and forced labor.
The two Afghans the BND invited to Zurich in 2005 were from the Taliban’s “middle management” and close to the Quetta Shura leadership circles, Der Spiegel said, describing one man as an impulsive senior Taliban nicknamed “Commander” and a younger, somber man who acted as his adviser.
The Germans at the time wanted to see whether the Taliban were ready to break their ties with al-Qaida. In return, Germany would have shown support for a demand the two Taliban made in Zurich: political recognition of the kind once given to Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization.
After more than two months, which involved a dozen meetings in Zurich, also with other Taliban, the negotiations ended fruitless -- mainly because of the unwillingness of the Taliban to break ties with al-Qaida, the magazine said.
While Britain and other European nations have in the past played with or even tried to enact the idea of talking to the Taliban, some observers don’t see much chance for such a dialog to prove fruitful.
After all, it already failed in 2005, at a time when the West was seemingly winning the war in northern Afghanistan. Today, two years later, the Taliban have made a bloody come back in the northern provinces.
