Be patient, give Taliban space to form government, says British army chief
It may be that this Taliban is a different Taliban to the one that people remember from the 1990s, says chief of defence staff
The world should be “patient” and give the Taliban the space to form a new government in Afghanistan, the British chief of defence staff has said in an interview.
General Sir Nick Carter said he was in contact with former Afghan president Hamid Karzai, who will meet the Taliban on Wednesday.
“We have to be patient, we have to hold our nerve and we have to give them the space to form a government and we have to give them the space to show their credentials,” Sir Nick told the BBC.
“It may be that this Taliban is a different Taliban to the one that people remember from the 1990s.”
“We may well discover, if we give them the space, that this Taliban is of course more reasonable but what we absolutely have to remember is that they are not a homogenous organisation – the Taliban is a group of disparate tribal figures that come from all over rural Afghanistan.”
Sir Nick said the Taliban were essentially “country boys” who lived by “Pashtunwali”, which is interpreted as being “the way of the Afghans” or “the code of life”.
“It may well be a Taliban that is more reasonable,” Carter said. “It’s less repressive. And indeed, if you look at the way it is governing Kabul at the moment, there are some indications that it is more reasonable.”
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Some British army veterans, though, were doubtful.
“People should not be seduced by these smooth words,” Charlie Herbert, a former major general who served in Afghanistan and also worked as a senior NATO adviser, told Sky News.
“The Taliban need international recognition. They’ve taken power by force and they’re now desperate for international recognition, from China, from Russia and the West, they need that. So of course they’re going to use these charming words about equal opportunities for women,” he said.
Herbert said the Taliban are simply “biding their time”.
“They are waiting, they are biding their time until we leave Kabul and then the bloodletting will start when there are no journalists and no internationals to see it.”
