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.

Prime minister's own office broke expense rules

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's own department has repeatedly broken the government's tough rules for hospitality spending.

An internal report on how the Privy Council Office spent $340,000 on hospitality found widespread flouting of a basic rule — that is, public servants must get prior approval from a supervisor before spending the cash.

The review of 2,100 hospitality claims over 13 months, ending last June, found employees repeatedly failed to get a green light before racking up expenses.

The average claim was for about $160, for drinks, meals and other largesse.

The survey examined expense claims in the Prime Minister's Office as well those run up by the Privy Council Office, Harper's own department and the central organ of the Canadian government.

Auditors initially found several instances in which hospitality expenses were incurred without pre-authorization. But they were assured by senior managers that the problem had since been corrected.

So auditors randomly selected 20 more-recent hospitality claims — and found only half had been authorized in advance, clear evidence that the rules continued to be flouted, despite the protestations of senior management.

Money spent without prior approval

"For the majority of hospitality expenditures, Accounting Operations receives the pre-authorization form after the expenditure has been incurred," says the internal report.

The practice is specifically banned by the Financial Administration Act, and since coming to power in 2006, the Conservatives have further tightened spending on hospitality to curtail alleged abuses.

Last Nov. 24, Stockwell Day — then Treasury Board president — announced another crackdown on hospitality, citing as an example of abuse a $31,700 reception thrown by Statistics Canada for 400 people in 2005.

Day said the event "was not a good signal to be sending" as Canadians tighten their belts — and that a more restrictive policy would kick in on Jan. 1.

The Canadian Press later reported Harper had personally approved a $47,000 event for 600 employees in Privy Council Office.

Hospitality was budgeted at $7,400 for the PCO event, held three months before Day's tough-talking announcement and roughly equivalent in value to the Statistics Canada reception.

A spokesman for the Privy Council Office says that since Jan. 1, managers who fail to pre-authorize hospitality tabs are required to explain why and what they're doing to stop the problem.

Raymond Rivet also says they are including a reminder about pre-authorization in training sessions that began in February.

The so-called assurance review was completed in early March, but only recently released. The report does not provide any details of the offending hospitality claims.

The 2009 federal budget imposed a two-year freeze on spending for travel, conference and hospitality government wide. Privy Council Office reduced its bill for those items to $3 million in 2010-2011, down from $3.8 million in 2009-2010, and $4.1 million the previous year, Rivet said.

Gadhafi says NATO will not win in Libya

Provoked by renewed daylight NATO bombing of his capital, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi raged against the alliance Friday, screaming his message and daring Western forces to keep it up.

Gadhafi spoke in a telephone call that was piped through loudspeakers to a few thousand people demonstrating in Tripoli's Green Square, at the end of a day when NATO intensified bombing runs across the capital. State television carried the Gadhafi message live, then repeated it a few minutes later.

"NATO will be defeated," he yelled in a hoarse, agitated voice. "They will pull out in defeat."

The sound of automatic weapons being fired defiantly into the air echoed through the square for hours as carloads of pro-Gadhafi supporters — many with children in tow — crammed the streets leading to the plaza. Although there was a large presence of police and soldiers in the square, many of those popping off rounds wore civilian clothes.

Protesters and foreign journalists in the capital said it was one of the biggest such demonstrations since airstrikes began.

"Everyone in Libya wants Col. Gadhafi, not some traitors," Rajab Hamman, a 51-year-old engineer from Tripoli, said in the square as another demonstrator shot a magazine load of automatic rifle fire into the air a few steps away. "These are the real, true Libyans," he said of the crowd.

East of Tripoli, meanwhile, Gadhafi's forces exchanged intense shelling with rebels who are slowly breaking the government siege on their western stronghold, the port city of Misrata.

Doctors at the Hikma hospital in Misrata said nine rebel fighters and a woman living near the battle were killed and 30 others were wounded. Government casualties were not known.

Barrages of artillery and Grad missiles were landing on rebel lines as they continued trying to advance out of Misrata, 200 kilometres, east of the capital. The heaviest shelling rained down between the towns of Dafniya and Zlitan, west of the Mediterranean port. Rebels were holding their own with return fire from their front about 32 kilometres west of the port.

For weeks rebels had been bottled up in Misrata, one of a handful of toeholds they hold in western Libya. The eastern third of the country is under rebel control from their de facto capital, Benghazi.

As NATO warplanes began stepping up attacks on Libyan government forces, bases and ammunition depots in recent days, the rebels in Misrata used the distraction to start their push out of the city toward Tripoli. Fighting has been intense along that front, with the rebels only able to advance about 32 kilometres.

Explosions in Tripoli

NATO attacked the Libyan capital at midday Friday, pounding a target in the south of the city and sending a thick cloud of black smoke rising high into the air.

A series of explosions rumbled across other parts of the city as fighter jets could be heard flying overhead. Fire engines raced through the streets, sirens blaring.

It wasn't clear what was hit or whether there were casualties. Friday is the main day of rest in Libya, with many people off work.

NATO has been ramping up the pressure on Gadhafi's regime. Though most airstrikes happen under cover of darkness, daytime raids have grown more frequent.

Friday's raids followed a barrage that struck multiple targets late Thursday night.

Prime Minister Al-Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi accused NATO of a "new level of aggression" over the past 72 hours in which he said the military alliance intentionally targeted civilian buildings, including a hotel and a university.

"It has become clear to us that NATO has moved on to deliberately hitting civilian buildings. ... This is a crime against humanity," he told reporters in the capital.

Libya's Health Ministry released new casualty figures that put the number of civilians killed in NATO airstrikes through June 7 at 856. There was no way to independently verify the figure and previous government-announced tolls from individual strikes have proven to be exaggerated.

As the new NATO airstrikes Friday blasted the capital, alliance Wing Cmdr. Mike Bracken said Gadhafi's future at the helm of Libya was what he called a "political decision." Bracken spoke by video conference to reporters in Brussels, NATO headquarters.

A coalition including France, Britain and the United States launched the first strikes against Gadhafi's forces under a United Nations resolution to protect civilians on March 19. NATO assumed control of the air campaign over Libya on March 31. It's joined by a number of Arab allies.

In Brussels, NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu said there were no indications Gadhafi would stop attacking the opposition.

"It is hard to imagine the end to attacks on civilians while the pro-Gadhafi regime is still in power," Lungescu said in Brussels.

"It is unfortunately still the case that pro-Gadhafi forces continue to show shocking determination to harm the Libyan people."

What started as a peaceful uprising inside Libya against Gadhafi has grown into a civil war, with rebels now holding a third of the country in the east and pockets in the west.

Fighting between government forces and the rebels had reached a stalemate until last week when NATO launched the heaviest bombardment of Gadhafi forces since the alliance took control of the skies over Libya.