Insurgents in Kabul for Government Talks

KABUL -- A senior delegation of the Hezb-e-Islami, one of Afghanistan's main insurgent groups, has arrived in Kabul with a plan to hold peace talks with government officials, officials said Monday.

The government has recently intensified its efforts to coax mid- and low-level militants from the battlefield amid a lingering stalemate on the military front against Taliban-led insurgents. Kabul is offering the militants economic incentives to put down their weapons in a move widely supported by the international community, including the United States.

Hezb-e-Islami, one of the three main insurgent groups waging war against the Afghan government and international troops in Afghanistan, sent a delegation with a plan for bringing peace to the country, said Haroon Zarghoon, a spokesman for the militant group.

The delegation was being led by Qutbuddin Helal, who is in charge of Hezb-e-Islami's political section, and also included Qareeb-ul-Rahman Sayed, the former spokesman for the group, said Zarghoon, speaking by phone from an undisclosed location.

Zarghoon would not disclose the content of the peace plan, but a former Hezb-e-Islami member, who was among the officials who worked for months to facilitate the talks between the two sides, said the withdrawal of foreign forces was the top demand by the group in return for its renunciation of violence.

The plan calls for the 120,000 foreign troops currently stationed in the country to start withdrawing from Afghanistan in June in a process to be completed within six months, he said, adding that a commission would be assigned to rewrite the Afghan constitution.

The demand for the withdrawal is a full year ahead of U.S. President Obama's plan to start pulling out U.S. troops from the country. This year, Obama has ordered an additional 30,000 forces to arrive in Afghanistan by the summer.

A presidential palace official who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to talk to the media, said the Hezb-e-Islami delegation had already met some government officials. President Hamid Karzai has also met the delegation personally but the sides did not reach any consensus, the official said.

"The president has met them, but the real discussion is taking place between the Hezb-e-Islami representatives and government negotiators," he said. "It might last for several days or weeks."

Hezb-e-Islami is led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an anti-Soviet guerrilla leader and former prime minister who was chiefly responsible for plunging the country into a bloody civil war after the 1992 fall of the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul.

The relations between Hezb-e-Islami and the Taliban movement have been ambiguous and testy. While both groups cooperate in eastern Afghanistan, tensions are obvious in other parts of the country.

This month, dozens of Hezb-e-Islami fighters joined the Afghan government in the northern province of Baghlan after a three-day battle with Taliban insurgents.

Several former Hezb-e-Islami officials work in Karzai's government, including Abdul Hadi Arghandiwal, who was appointed economic minister in January.

While there had been indirect talks with Hekmatyar's representatives in the past, Karzai's overtures to the Taliban have yet to make any breakthroughs. The Taliban has repeatedly said it would not come to any negotiating table until the complete withdrawal of foreign forces.