Afghan leader says U.S. in contact with Taliban

The United States is in contact with the Taliban about a possible settlement to the war in Afghanistan, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said on Saturday, the first official confirmation of U.S. involvement in negotiations.


U.S. officials would neither confirm nor deny Karzai's assertion on American contacts with the Taliban, which was ousted from power in a 2001 U.S. invasion for hosting al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden.


Karzai said an Afghan push toward peace talks, after nearly a decade of war, had not yet reached a stage where the government and insurgents were meeting, but their representatives had been in touch.


"Peace talks are going on with the Taliban. The foreign military and especially the United States itself is going ahead with these negotiations," Karzai said in a speech in Kabul.


"The peace negotiations between (the) Afghan government and the Taliban movement are not yet based on a certain agenda or physical (meetings), there are contacts established."


In Washington, White House National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden would not confirm any contacts with the Taliban, but said the United States supported reconciliation in Afghanistan.


"I can't confirm any specific interactions, but we continue to support an Afghan-led reconciliation and reintegration process that would bring insurgents in from the cold," Hayden said.


Taliban reintegration was possible "provided they meet the Afghan government's long-standing red lines: renounce violence, break with al Qaeda and live under the Afghan constitution, including respect for the rights of women," she said.


A U.S. official in Kabul said Washington had assisted Afghan-led reintegration initiatives aimed at the Taliban.


"We must help create conditions necessary to enable a political settlement among the Afghan people. This includes reconciling those insurgents who are willing to renounce al Qaeda, forsake violence and adhere to the Afghan constitution," the U.S. Embassy official said.


SANCTIONS MOVE


The United States invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, weeks after the September 11 attacks, to help oust the Taliban. The Taliban regrouped and has been waging a fierce insurgency for years against the government, U.S. troops and other Western allies in Afghanistan.


President Barack Obama is expected to announce next month how many troops he plans to withdraw from Afghanistan as part of a commitment to begin reducing the U.S. military presence in July and hand over to Afghan security forces by 2014.


There are currently about 100,000 U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan, up from 34,000 when Obama took office in 2009.


Karzai was speaking the day after the U.N. Security Council split the U.N. sanctions list for Taliban and al Qaeda figures into two, which envoys said could help induce the Taliban into talks on a peace deal in Afghanistan.


Despite hopes that talks with the Taliban could provide the political underpinning for a staged U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the discussions are still not at the stage where they can be a deciding factor.


Diplomats say there have been months of preliminary talks, but the United States has never confirmed any contacts. So little is known about the exchanges that they have been open to widely different interpretations.


There are many Afghans, among them women's and civil society activists, who fear talks with the insurgents could undo much of the progress they have made in the decade since the Taliban was swept from power.


"We should not give up 10 years of achievements in Afghan women's rights. If that happens, these peace talks will be incomplete and unjust," said Suraya Parlika, head of the All Afghan Women's Union and a senator in the Afghan parliament.


The closest anyone in the U.S. establishment has come to publicly acknowledging efforts to kick-start talks was when Defense Secretary Robert Gates said this month there could be political talks with the Taliban by the end of this year, if the NATO alliance kept making military advances on the ground.

Rare suicide attack in Pakistani capital kills 1

A suicide bomber blew himself up at a busy market in the Pakistani capital on Monday, killing at least one person in the first bombing in Islamabad in a year and a half, police said.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the bombing but the Pakistani Taliban have pledged to carry out attacks in retaliation for the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden last month in an army town not far from Islamabad.

The suicide bomber tried to enter a bank in the market but was stopped by a security guard, said Islamabad police chief Wajid Durrani. The bomber then detonated his explosives, killing the guard and wounding four others, Durrani said.

The blast ripped through the ground floor of the bank, scattering body parts and pieces of broken glass on the pavement outside. Police worked to keep people from gathering at the scene for fear that there might be a second blast.

Mohammad Shafi, a 45-year-old employee of a nearby marriage hall, said he was on his way to work when he heard a loud explosion. The blast knocked him over, and he quickly jumped up and ran to some bushes for safety.

"There was smoke everywhere," said Shafi.

Ehsan Masih, a 36-year-old security guard at a nearby office, said the blast rattled the windows and doors of his building. "Broken glass hit me and several others," he said.

The last bombing in Islamabad was in December 2009, when a suicide bomber set off explosives hidden under his jacket outside the entrance of Pakistan's navy headquarters, killing one security guard and wounding 11 other people.

But there have been two high-profile assassinations in Islamabad in the past six months. Salman Taseer, governor of Punjab province, was shot by his bodyguard outside a cafe in January. Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan's federal minister for religious minorities, was gunned down outside his house in March.

Authorities have set up multiple police checkpoints throughout Islamabad in an attempt to prevent attacks. Analysts have said army operations targeting militant sanctuaries in the northwest have also helped reduce attacks in Islamabad by disrupting the Taliban operations. But other cities throughout Pakistan have suffered frequent attacks in recent years.

A suicide bomber on a motorcycle detonated his explosives in a commercial and residential area of the northwestern city of Peshawar around midnight on Saturday, killing 34 people and wounding more than 100 others. Many of the people killed and wounded were police and rescue workers who rushed to the scene in response to a smaller blast minutes earlier.

Also Monday, a roadside bomb struck a military convoy in Pakistan's South Waziristan tribal area near the Afghan border, killing three soldiers and wounding four others, said intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.

South Waziristan was the main sanctuary for the Pakistani Taliban before the military launched a large ground offensive in October 2009. But attacks against security forces have continued in the area.