WASHINGTON: The commander of US forces in Afghanistan said in an interview published on Monday that senior Taliban leaders could join a new government in Kabul.

Although US leaders started talking publicly about including the Taliban in a political solution earlier this month, Gen Stanley McChrystal went a step ahead when he spoke of also accepting senior Taliban leaders in a possible new arrangement.

When asked if senior Taliban leaders might eventually become government leaders in Kabul, Gen McChrystal said: “I think that anybody who dedicates themselves to the future and not the past, and anybody whose future is focussed on the right kinds of things for Afghanistan,” might participate in government.

In a related development, the leader of the UN mission in Afghanistan called for the removal of some Taliban leaders from the UN terrorist list as a step towards beginning negotiations.

In an interview to The New York Times, Kai Eide, the United Nations special representative, also implored the American military to meet another Taliban demand -- speed up its review of the roughly 750 detainees in its military prisons in Afghanistan.

Mr Eide said he hoped that the two steps would eventually open the way to face-to-face talks between Afghan officials and Taliban leaders, many of whom are hiding in Pakistan. “The two sides have been at an impasse for years over almost every fundamental issue, including the issue of talking itself,” the NYT noted.

Diplomatic observers in Washington say that Gen McChrystal’s remarks are particularly significant because they come before an international conference on Afghanistan in London on Thursday, which is expected to address a framework for transferring security responsibilities to the Afghans.

In an interview with the Financial Times and also published in a number of US newspapers on Monday, Gen McChrystal said high-level political negotiations with leaders of the Taliban could help bring an end to the conflict.

“I think that (negotiations) is in the purview of the government of Afghanistan to do, but I believe that a political solution to all conflicts is the inevitable outcome. And it’s the right outcome. I think that the re-integration of fighters can take a lot of the energy out of the current levels of the insurgency. Then I think you open up, the option, the possibility, for everybody to look at what’s the right combination of participation in the government here,” he said.

The Christian Science Monitor observed that Gen McChrystal’s statement “could be aimed toward influencing the conference in London”.

The remarks by the US commander and the UN envoy were the latest in a series of Afghan and Western efforts to engage the Taliban movement with diplomatic and political means.

American, Afghan and Nato leaders are also preparing to start an ambitious programme to persuade rank-and-file Taliban fighters to give up fighting in exchange for schooling and jobs. That plan, expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, will be the focus of the London conference as well.

The plan aims at the bottom of the Taliban hierarchy — the foot soldiers who are widely perceived as mostly poor, illiterate, and susceptible to promises of money and jobs. In 2007 and 2008, a similar effort unfolded in Iraq, where some 30,000 members of the country’s Sunni sect — many of them former insurgents — were put on the American payroll. “Partly as a result, violence there plummeted,” the NYT noted.

Last week, the American envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan signalled some willingness to allow the names of some Taliban to be taken off the UN list as long as they were not senior commanders responsible for atrocities or associated with Al Qaeda.

“A lot of the names don’t mean much to me,” Richard Holbrooke said in Kabul. “Some of the people on the list are dead, some shouldn’t be on the list and some are among the most dangerous people in the world.

“I would be all in favour of looking at the list on a case-by-case basis to see if there are people on the list who are on the list by mistake and should be removed, or in fact are dead,” he said.

Reuters adds: Gen McChrystal expressed the hope that increased troop levels will weaken the Taliban enough that their leaders will accept a peace deal.

He told the Financial Times on Monday that there had been ‘enough fighting’ and held out the possibility the Taliban could eventually help run the countryLINK