KABUL — President Hamid Karzai’s chief of staff on Thursday said British authorities were responsible for bringing a Taliban impostor into the presidential palace and that foreigners should stay out of delicate negotiations with the Afghan insurgent group.
In an interview, Mohammad Umer Daudzai said the British brought a man purporting to be Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, a senior Taliban leader, to meet Karzai in July or August but that an Afghan at the meeting knew “this is not the man.” Afghan intelligence later determined that the visitor was actually a shopkeeper from the Pakistani city of Quetta, he said.
“This shows that this process should be Afghan-led and fully Afghanized,” Daudzai said. “The last lesson we draw from this: International partners should not get excited so quickly with those kind of things. . . . Afghans know this business, how to handle it. We handle it with care, we handle it with a result-based approach, with very less damage to all the other processes.”
The episode has embarrassed Afghan and Western officials, and it has undercut the notion circulated earlier this year by senior U.S. officials that there was some momentum toward possible peace talks.
The false Mansour was “the Brits’ guy,” said a senior American official familiar with the case. “It was the British who brought him forward.”
A spokesman for the British Embassy in Kabul declined to comment.
Daudzai said Afghan authorities first made contact with a man claiming to be a representative of Mansour about six to eight months ago. He was ready to arrange peace talks, and he said Mansour wanted a timeline for foreign troop withdrawal and a constitutional change to incorporate Islamic law.
But the palace, Daudzai said, chose not to meet with Mansour’s associate “because he was unknown, very junior.”
Then the British took over, he said, and used that contact to arrange for Mansour to visit Kabul. Daudzai said British representatives, but not Americans, were present during the meeting with Karzai.
Also Thursday, the Afghan attorney general’s office announced that authorities had arrested nine people on allegations of participating in voting fraud. Six of the suspects work with money-exchange companies, and three are construction company owners who were parliamentary candidates.
Afghan authorities also have issued an arrest warrant for a United Nations official who allegedly promised the construction company owners that they would be elected in return for tens of thousands of dollars, money that was entrusted with the money-exchange officials, Deputy Attorney General Rahmatullah Nazari said.
