Taliban: Afghan president must go, to get peace deal

THE Taliban has said it does not want to monopolise power, but insists there will be no peace in Afghanistan until there is a new negotiated government in Kabul and President Ashraf Ghani is removed.

A spokesman for the group, Suhail Shaheen, laid out the insurgents’ stance on what should come next with the country on a precipice as the last US and Nato soldiers leave.

The Taliban has swiftly captured territory in recent weeks, seized strategic border crossings and is threatening a number of provincial capitals.

This week, the top US military officer, Gen Mark Milley, told a Pentagon press conference that the Taliban has “strategic momentum”, and did not rule out a complete Taliban takeover. But he said it this is not inevitable. “I don’t think the end game is yet written,” he said.

Memories of the Taliban’s last time in power some 20 years ago, when it enforced a harsh brand of Islam that denied girls an education and barred women from work, have stoked fears of their return among many.

Afghans who can afford it are applying by the thousands for visas to leave Afghanistan, fearing a violent descent into chaos. The US-Nato withdrawal is more than 95% complete and due to be finished by August 31.

Mr Shaheen said the Taliban will lay down its weapons when a negotiated government acceptable to all sides in the conflict is installed in Kabul and Mr Ghani’s government is gone.

“I want to make it clear that we do not believe in the monopoly of power because any governments who (sought) to monopolise power in Afghanistan in the past, were not successful governments,” said Mr Shaheen, apparently including the Taliban’s own five-year rule in that assessment. “So we do not want to repeat that same formula.”

But he was also uncompromising on the continued rule of Mr Ghani, calling him a warmonger and accusing him of using speech on the Islamic holy day of Eid-al-Adha to promise an offensive against the Taliban.

Mr Shaheen said the government’s repeated demands for a ceasefire while Mr Ghani stays in power were tantamount to demanding a Taliban surrender. Before any ceasefire, there must be an agreement on a new government “acceptable to us and to other Afghans”, he said. Then “there will be no war”.

Mr Shaheen said under this new government, women will be allowed to work, go to school, and participate in politics, but will have to wear the hijab, or headscarf.

He said women will not be required to have a male relative with them to leave their home, and that Taliban commanders in newly occupied districts have orders that universities, schools and markets operate as before, including with the participation of women and girls.

However, there have been repeated reports from captured districts of the Taliban imposing harsh restrictions on women, even setting fire to schools.

The Taliban controls about half of Afghanistan’s 419 district centres, and while it has yet to capture any of the 34 provincial capitals, it is pressuring about half of them, Gen Milley said.