World

British accused by Afghan leaders of secret plan for training Taleban

By team ⋅ March 27, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

The Scotsman, 4th February 2007

Secret British plans for a Taleban training camp in Southern Afghanistan are being a spectacular diplomatic fallout that has seen Anglo-Afghan relations plummet to an almost unprecedented low.

Afghan officials claim the camp for 2,000 fighters was part of a top-secrete deal to make the insurgents swap sides. The government claims that the plans prove British agents were talking to the Taleban without the president’s permission.

The plans were discovered on a computer memory stick seized by the Afghan secret police. The thumb-sized computer chip was impounded by Afghanistan’s national directorate of security, when they moved against a party of international diplomats visiting Helmand, on 23rd December, last year.

The memory stick information revealed £64,000 had been spent preparing the camp and a further £102,000 was earmarked to run it in 2008, an Afghan official said. The figures sparked allegations that British agents were paying the Taleban.

An Afghan government informant said the training camp was part of a controversial British plan to use bands of reconciled Taleban, called Community Defence Volunteers, to fight the remaining insurgents. He said, ‘The camp would provide military training for 1,800 ordinary Taleban fighters and 200 low level commanders’.

The British insist president Hamid Karzai’s office knew what was going on. But Mr Karzai expelled two top diplomats, amid accusations they were part of a plot to buy off the insurgents.

The argument was the first in a series of disagreements. Since then Mr Karzai has blocked the appointment of Paddy Ashdown to a top UN job in Kabul and has blamed British troops for losing control of Helmand province.

Experts trace recent behaviour has deliberately ‘two fingers’ to the British. Recently, the president’s political mentor, Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, endorsed a death sentence on a student journalist, Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, for blasphemy, and two British contractors have been arrested in Kabul on trumped up weapons charges.

A ministry insider said: ‘When they were arrested the British said the ministry of interior and the national security council knew about it, but no one knew anything. That’s why the president was so angry’.

UK diplomats, the UN, western official and senior Afghan mandarins have all confirmed the outline of the plan, which they agree is entirely British-led, but all refused to talk about it on the record. The president’s office claimed that their silence was a matter of national security.

Government staff also claimed the ‘EU peace builders’ had handed over mobile phones, laptops and airtime credit to insurgents. Officially, the British have remained tight-lipped.