It may not have amounted to formal peace talks, but a two-day meeting outside Paris at which Taliban representatives joined other Afghan players was a rare opportunity for bitter enemies to present their positions in a neutral setting.

The December 20-21 conference was the third such event arranged by the French Foundation for Strategic Research, but the first one to be attended by representatives of insurgent groups – the Taliban and the smaller Hezb-i Islami. The 20 participants also included officials from the Kabul government and members of opposition political parties in Afghanistan.

Speaking on December 16, France’s foreign minister Laurent Fabius made it clear that the event was intended to generate discussion, but not negotiations.

President Hamed Karzai expressed support for the meeting, saying he backed any forum for discussion with the insurgents.

The conference came amid renewed efforts to bring militant groups to the negotiating table. The Afghan government’s High Peace Council travelled to Islamabad in November to secure the release of potential interlocutors held in Pakistani prisons, and the Security Council lifted travel sanctions for Taliban members taking part in peace talks.

The semi-secretive nature of the French meeting meant that little emerged about what was discussed. It was clear, however, that few concessions were on offer. The Taliban envoys restated their position that neither the Afghan constitution nor the Kabul government were legitimate, and they had no plans to negotiate with the latter now or in the future. 

Nevertheless, back in Kabul, the High Peace Council expressed hope that the Taliban would enter direct negotiations with it.

Council representative Ismail Qasemyar said the conference was helpful in that it helped familiarise each side with others’ positions, but in the end, substantive talks needed to exclude foreign influence.

“We are not optimistic about conferences that are not [solely] between Afghans,” he said, in an indirect reference to the French-sponsored event.

Part of the various peace efforts undertaken to-date has involved identifying “moderate Taliban” who might be more amenable to a deal than others. But the delegates to the Paris conference appeared as resolutely opposed to compromise as ever.

Qasemyar hinted at a degree of flexibility behind the bluster, saying, “There are certain things we can’t talk about. The Taliban’s remarks at the conference were aimed purely at an international audience. The real position is quite different.”

By contrast, Satar Saadat, a political analyst in Kabul, believes the Taliban leadership is in a real quandary about how to proceed and where it can make compromises acceptable to its own followers.

“For the last 11 years, Taliban leaders have motivated their forces to carry on the fight by saying the country is under attack, its government is not Islamic, and God’s religion is under threat,” he said. “While the war is framed in terms of religion, it also highly personalised because the Taliban ranks include people who have lost family members.

“If foreign forces are still based in Afghanistan, the constitution remains unchanged and the movement has no substantial guarantees inside or outside the country, how can its leaders convince the rank-and-file? This will split the Taliban.”

Others take a more cynical view of the insurgents’ ability to make peace, regarding them as merely an instrument of Pakistan’s intelligence service.

“Although the Taliban are tired of fighting and want to end the war, they are controlled by the intelligence services of neighbouring countries. They have no independent political will and cannot do anything without their say-so,” Moin Marastial of the Rights and Justice Party said.

Saadat said there were too many external factors at play, with various states protecting their own interests in Afghanistan and countering the influence of others.

In this context, the Paris conference also had to be viewed as partial, he said, since the French government had historically backed Jamiat-e Islami, a northern, Tajik-dominated faction and the broader Shura-ye-Nazari, sometimes known as the Northern Alliance.

“The French now realise that the Taliban will have a stronger role in a future Afghanistan, so they are trying to broker some kind of peace between the Taliban and Jamiat-e Islami and Shura-ye-Nazar, so that the rights and position of these latter groups are given consideration in any future equation,” Saadat said.

There is general agreement that outside interference was a chronic problem.

“All of the political and factional groups engaged in 30 years of war in Afghanistan have been controlled by outsiders. They are not independent – the Taliban are in Pakistan’s hands; the National Front, National Coalition and some other political parties are controlled by Iran and Russia; and the government is under United States control,” they point out.  “What are we to expect from these groups…? No negotiations, no conference will have any outcome unless the foreign masters of these groups reach agreement.”

Marastial suggested that the 2014 deadline for withdrawing foreign troops from Afghanistan might be helpful in that it might focus minds on a long-term solution rather than short-term advantage.

“In addition to economic and political goals, the countries now trying to prepare the ground for talks with the Taliban also want a part in Afghanistan’s future, and a share of the credit if a negotiated peace is reached in Afghanistan,” he said.

Afghans Unimpressed by Pakistan Talks

Analysts have grave reservations about the High Peace Council’s role in advancing peace 

During  its three-day visit to Islamabad two months ago, the Council’s delegation met Pakistan’s president, prime minister, foreign minister, the army’s chief of staff and various other politicians and Muslim clerics in a bid to get them to engage wholeheartedly with a peace process for Afghanistan.

In practical terms, that also means identifying insurgents who are prepared to negotiate, even if they are in custody.

The talks produced a joint declaration calling on Afghan and Pakistani officials and the international community to work together to get insurgents’ names removed from a United Nations blacklist so they could take part in negotiations, and to ensure safe passage for such individuals.

Afterwards, High Peace Council chairman Salahuddin Rabbani said he believed officials in Islamabad were now committed to a talks process involving the Afghan insurgents.

The council’s spokesman Qiamuddin Kashaf said one success from the meetings was that religious scholars in Pakistan who used to describe the Taliban’s Afghan insurgency as a “jihad” were now supportive of negotiations.

At the council’s request, the Pakistani authorities released nine Afghan Taliban members from prison, although none was a particularly senior figure. Five more were freed subsequently. 

An unnamed member of the Taliban’s Quetta Council indicated that the group would take the proposed negotiations seriously, according to reports in the Pakistani media.

In Afghanistan, the upper house of parliament or Meshrano Jirga poured cold water on the talks, accusing the High Peace Council of indulging in a one-way dialogue – it made concessions to the Taliban, but secured nothing in return. The releases were just a gift to the insurgents, it said.

Afghan commentators were even less impressed, saying the peace council had achieved no progress towards ending the conflict since it was set up in 2009.

“I do not believe the commitments agreed between the High Peace Council and the Pakistani government at all,” political and defence affairs expert Atiqullah Amarkhel said. “The council itself is in question – it should have been dissolved. It has done this just to demonstrate its achievements, to secure its own survival.”

Many analysts, Amarkhel among them, said pledges of good faith from Islamabad were not to be trusted, since its real strategy involved controlling Afghanistan by providing covert assistance to the Taliban to undermine security.

“The Pakistani government isn’t so stupid that it would cede Afghanistan without securing advantages and achieving its aims,” Amarkhel said. “Unless Pakistan is confronted with force, it will never abandon its satanic goals in Afghanistan.”

Another political analyst, Satar Saadat, agreed that Pakistan had no reason to abandon a winning position.

“It isn’t possible that Pakistan is going to work honestly with Afghanistan on the peace process, and lose the Taliban, its best military force, by persuading it to negotiate with the Afghan government,” he said.

Saadat also suggested that Islamabad wanted to underline its own central role in the future of Afghanistan, especially in light of a parallel peace process that might exclude it, where negotiations would take place with a Taliban office in the Gulf state of Qatar. “Recently, Britain and the US decided to restart the Qatar negotiation process. Pakistan wants to sabotage this process, and that’s the reason it adopted a softer line on the demands made by the High Peace Council. In my view, the peace council has been entrapped in a Pakistani plot,” he said.

On the streets of Kabul, people were divided on whether the peace process was heading the right way, or any way at all.

“We should not be downhearted. I believe every war ends though negotiations and a common understanding,” university student Nawid said. “Regardless of whether Pakistan’s intentions are honest, we must convince the Taliban – who are Afghans – that war benefits Pakistan, not us, and that they should stop fighting.”

Another Kabul resident, Abdul Qayyum, disagreed, suggesting that the peace council was a purely symbolic body that had to travel about and hold meetings to use up its budget and justify its existence.

As for Pakistan, he said, “politicians [there] are not like ours – they wouldn’t support anything that wasn’t to their country’s advantage”.

 –By Hafizullah Gardesh & Mina Habib, IWPR