KABUL, Afghanistan — The top commander in Afghanistan said Tuesday that he was not surprised by reports that an impostor was involved in peace talks with the Afghan government because there were long-held doubts about one of the purported Taliban representatives.
In a setback to efforts to negotiate an end to the war, an Afghan close to the negotiations said the man, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, who claimed to be one of highest-ranking members of the Taliban council leading the insurgency, was a fraud.
Speaking to reporters in Berlin, Gen. David Petraeus said there had been skepticism all along regarding the identity of one man claiming to be a Taliban leader.
“It may well be that that skepticism was well-founded,” Petraeus said.
President Hamid Karzai moved quickly to dampen the fallout from his purported meeting with Mansour by denying the encounter ever took place.
He dismissed the reports, which first appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post, as propaganda.
“I did not see Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, and Mullah Mansour did not come to Afghanistan. Don’t accept this news from the foreign press regarding meetings with the elders of the Taliban because most of them are propaganda,” Karzai said.
An Afghan familiar with the reconciliation efforts, confirmed that a delegate claiming to be Mansour “was a fraud.” He spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize his contacts with both sides.
Mansour, a former civil aviation minister during Taliban rule, is a senior member of the Taliban’s ruling council in the Pakistani city of Quetta. That council, or shura, is run by Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.
According to the reports, the impostor met with Afghan and NATO officials three times - including once with Karzai - before they discovered he was not Mansour. He was purportedly paid to attend.
Mansour was well-known and it is unclear why officials would have had such a difficult time identifying him. There are several former Taliban in parliament and in the 70-member High Peace Council recently formed by Karzai to find a political solution to the insurgency. It was reported that the man was believed to be a shopkeeper in Quetta.
The president also took the opportunity Tuesday to complain about some of NATO’s military operations aimed at crushing the insurgency.
Karzai expressed his concerns about night raids, which have caused friction between him and international forces, at a weekend summit with NATO leaders in Lisbon, Portugal.
NATO says the night raids have taken a significant toll on the leadership of insurgent networks.
“The position and stance of the Afghan government was very clear and is very clear,” Karzai said. “Those night raids which cause civilian houses to be destroyed, cause civilian casualties or they are entering people’s houses without coordinating with the Afghan forces ... we are against them.”
The coalition hopes night raids will weaken the Taliban by pressuring the midlevel commanders to abandon the battlefield and force top insurgent leaders to the negotiating table. NATO says it conducts the operations jointly with Afghan soldiers and that shots are fired in less than 20 percent of the operations.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration is citing some progress in the 9-year-old Afghanistan war in its latest biannual report to Congress.
The Pentagon-led assessment, released Tuesday, describes progress as fragile but holding. Officials said the findings represent a slight improvement from previous months.
The report is an early look into the kind of cautious assessment expected to reach President Barack Obama’s desk next month. The December review is supposed to determine whether Obama’s war strategy, which includes a buildup of some 30,000 troops, is succeeding in breaking the momentum of the Taliban insurgency.
“The deliberate application of our strategy is beginning to have cumulative effects and security is slowly beginning to expand,” states the report, which looks at operations from April through Sept. 30.
Still, the report adds, the number of Afghans rating their security situation as “bad” is the highest it’s been since 2008 with “kinetic events” increasing by more than half during the summer.
Information for this article was contributed by Kathy Gannon, Heidi Vogt, Deb Riechmann, Rahim Faiez, Anne Flaherty and Melissa Eddy of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 10 on 11/24/2010