Afghan Taliban can be split: expert

THE HAGUE (Reuters) - Some Taliban insurgents can be split off from the group's hardline Islamist core provided peace efforts forge a credible government and improve security, a renowned Western expert on Afghanistan said.

Michael Semple, the Irish former deputy head of the European Union mission in Kabul, told Reuters some senior former Taliban were already playing a "strong positive role" in peace building on a small scale and more could follow their example.

"It can be done, and we do have a few demonstrated examples that prove that it is possible," he said in an interview on Monday on the eve of the first international conference on Kabul since President Barack Obama unveiled his Afghan strategy.

"But also we have to say that it is challenging and it is going to require a lot of things that are going to have to be done right if it is going to deliver enough people coning in to be able to make a difference to the overall conflict."

The United States has suggested it could reach out to insurgents to see if some can be peeled away from a hardline Islamist core linked to al Qaeda.

Vice President Joe Biden said this month that he believed only five percent of the Taliban were "incorrigible."

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is hoping to win support at the 90-nation conference for greater military involvement along with increased economic development and army and police training to defeat al Qaeda and Taliban insurgents.

WAR ON TERROR

More than 70,000 U.S. and NATO troops are in Afghanistan battling a growing insurgency by the Taliban movement, which is also spreading its influence in Pakistan through the porous mountain border between the two countries.

Semple, along with British U.N. official Mervyn Patterson, was expelled from Afghanistan in December 2007 after the Kabul government accused him of holding talks with the Taliban.

Both men had lived and worked in Afghanistan for more than a decade, even during the rule of the Taliban that was toppled by the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. Both are fluent in local languages and considered experts on the customs, rivalries and politics of Afghanistan's various tribal and racial groups.

Semple, speaking on the sidelines of a seminar on Afghanistan at the Clingendael Netherlands Institute of International Relations, said he saw grounds for "optimism" about splitting the Taliban because at root they lacked the international agenda of al Qaeda.

"The whole notion of a great war on terror was inadequate to cope with the complexity of Afghanistan, and fundamentally the Taliban movement, like it or not, is an Afghan movement which arose because of things which happened inside Afghanistan."

"And it was not Afghans who carried out the attacks on New York. It was al Qaeda who were sheltering among those Afghans which is the reason for this fundamental optimism that if handled in the right way it should be possible to peel away those Talibans who are focused on Afghan issues and who say that we have learned something from the past few years, from those who signed up to the global jihadi agenda."

Semple said reconciliation depended in part on improving security on the ground, echoing some analysts who say the Taliban will not be persuaded to enter talks as long as they sense they are winning the war on the ground.

"A collapse of security in the south of Afghanistan is not going to aid the cause of reconciliation and is not going to put anyone into a position where you can discuss a reasonable accommodation of splitting the international jihadists away from those Afghan fighters who are basically interested in national or local issues."