US 'must talk with Taliban leaders'

Peshawar: The US must broker a power-sharing agreement with the head of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, to establish peace in the region, the governor of Pakistan's lawless border areas has said.

Owais Ghani, who governs the North West Frontier Province and its adjoining tribal areas, is the most prominent figure to advocate publicly holding talks with commanders leading the insurgency against coalition forces in Afghanistan.

His thinking reflects that of Pakistan's military hard-liners who are accused by Western intelligence operatives of supporting the Afghan Taliban as a "hedging policy" to maintain influence in Afghanistan.

"They have to talk to Mullah Omar, certainly - not maybe - and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Haqqani group," Ghani said.

Power groups

"The solution, the bottom line, is that political stability will only come to Afghanistan when all political power groups, irrespective of the length of their beard, are given their just due share in the political dispensation in Afghanistan," he said.

The governor's remarks are likely to cause controversy among Pakistan's allies in the US-led "war on terror" and at home, where the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party is opposed to the Taliban.

Mullah Omar went into hiding during the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. British intelligence believes that he has his headquarters in Quetta.

In 2006, the former president Pervez Musharraf acknowledged that some retired Pakistani intelligence officials might still be involved in supporting their former Taliban proteges, whom they helped sweep to power in Afghanistan in the 1990s.

Jalaluddin Haqqani is a veteran Mujahideen commander who received US backing during the Soviet occupation in the 1970s and 1980s, and developed links with Osama bin Laden during that period.

The New York Times reported in July that the CIA had given Pakistan's prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, evidence that his country's military intelligence agency, the ISI, was still involved with Haqqani, who is now leading militants against coalition forces in Afghanistan. The CIA also had evidence, the report said, of ISI connections to a suicide bombing at the Indian embassy in Kabul that killed nearly 60 people on July 7.

Ghani said that Mullah Omar, Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the former Afghan prime minister who led the Hezb-e-Islami Mujahideen faction, were all still influential in Afghanistan.

"They are a power group that has to be preserved to seek political solutions - we would not destroy them because then you are contributing to further instability," he said but denied that Pakistan wanted the Taliban back.

Ghani said that the West must accept that the "Mullah is a political reality". But he also denied that Pakistan was supporting militant leaders.