Taliban want an ‘inclusive’ Afghanistan, British army chief suggests
The Taliban have changed and they want an “inclusive” Afghanistan, the head of the British army has said, representing an apparently sanguine appraisal of the situation in the war-torn country.
Speaking to Sky News on Wednesday, General Nick Carter, Britain’s chief of defense staff, said the Taliban are “country boys, who live by a code of honor.”
“They are bound together by a common purpose which is they don’t like corrupt governance. They don’t like governance that is self-serving.”
Asked about collaborating with the Taliban as the “enemy,” Carter replied, “You have to be very careful using the word enemy” when referring to the group. “They recognize that over the course of last twenty years Afghanistan has evolved. They recognize the fundamental role women have played in that evolution.”
Carter’s speech comes on the heels of the militant group’s promise to respect women’s rights under its rule.
General Carter explained that the Taliban “want to respect women’s rights under the Islamic Law and that will be the Sharia Law, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they wouldn’t be allowed to involve in government and in education and medicine and those things that they need them to be involved in.”
“We have to give them the space to show how they are going to step up to the plate,” Carter said, stressing that “whether or not we can work with them, will very much depend on how they treat all Afghans.”
He also told the BBC Radio 4’s Today program that the international community should be patient, and give the Taliban time “to show their credentials,” adding 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 homogeneous organization.”
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson also struck a note of caution while speaking in the Commons on Wednesday, saying the Taliban would be judged by its “actions rather than by its words.”
Since the Taliban captured the Afghan capital, Kabul, the group has granted amnesty to government workers and has spoken of its “commitment to the rights of women under the system of Sharia.”
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