The United States was not sincere about peace in Afghanistan when it signalled it would remain open to exploring a settlement that includes the Haqqani network, one of the group's senior commanders said on Thursday. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested in comments this week that Washington would not shut the door to the Haqqanis blamed for high-profile attacks in Afghanistan in any peace arrangement.
The Haqqanis saw the remarks as an attempt to divide Afghan insurgent groups and believed only the top leaders of the Taliban should negotiate, said the commander. "We had rejected many such offers from the United States in the past and reject this new offer as we are not authorised to decide the future of Afghanistan," he told Reuters.
In an interview with Reuters, Clinton did not spell out who the United States believes should speak for Afghanistan's insurgent groups and said it was too soon to tell whether any of them were serious about reconciliation. Inclusion of the Haqqani network in a hoped-for peace deal now a chief objective in the Obama administration's Afghanistan policy after a decade of war is a controversial idea in Washington.
Jalil Haqqani, 33, who helped organise the Haqqanis' operations, was one of four militants killed when two missiles allegedly fired by a US drone struck a house in a village, the officials said. The senior Haqqani commander denied the report and said Jalil had no link to the group. "Jalil was a highly trusted companion of Sirajuddin. He had been with the Haqqani group for a long time and was tasked with handling communications," one intelligence official said.
Sirajuddin said recently his group felt secure enough to operate freely in Afghanistan and had no need of safe havens in Pakistan. Sirajuddin told Reuters in September that his group would take part in peace talks, but only if the Afghan Taliban did so as well, a position reiterated by the senior commander. "The Haqqani network is not a separate movement. It's part of the Taliban and it cannot hold any separate talks. We are Taliban and Mullah Mohammad Omar is our leader," he said.