Afghanistan says offering Taliban aid, not bribes

MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) - Afghanistan will not pay bribes to persuade Taliban footsoldiers to stop fighting, but will help them to reintegrate into Afghan society and find jobs, Foreign Minister Zalmay Rasul said on Friday.

In an interview with Reuters, Rasul also rejected the suggestion that Taliban fighters might accept money under the scheme, which Western donors agreed to fund at a conference in London last week, and then simply resume their insurgency.

"We are not going to bribe them to stop fighting. If they come on board, drop their guns, reintegrate their village, they need to live. They need to have a life to feed their family," Rasul said at the Munich Security Conference in Germany.

"So we need to provide them the kind of social help -- for example land, agriculture, whatever they need -- so they can start to learn and have a proper life. The issue is not to pay them money or bribe them."

Rasul said the Taliban insurgents fighting the Afghan government and NATO forces were not a homogeneous group.

There were footsoldiers with no ideological motivation or links to groups like al Qaeda, and "those people can be brought on board," he said.

"But there are elements within the Taliban -- Pakistani Taliban and some Afghan Taliban -- that have closer links with al Qaeda, and those people cannot be integrated or reconciled, so we need to fight them."

TIES IMPROVING WITH PAKISTAN

The United States aims, through deploying an extra 30,000 troops this year, to weaken the insurgency to the point where its leaders would accept some form of settlement with the Afghan government.

President Barack Obama plans to start withdrawing U.S. troops in July 2011, although the pace of the drawdown will depend on conditions at the time.

Rasul said ties were improving with Pakistan, which Afghanistan has long viewed with suspicion because of its ties to the Afghan Taliban, which it backed through the 1990s.

Many security analysts believe Pakistan continues to see those links as a means of exercising leverage in Afghanistan and countering the influence there of its rival, India.

Rasul said Afghanistan and Pakistan were in discussion about how Pakistan could help stop militants who had safe haven there from crossing the border to attack Afghan and NATO forces.

"We are in the phase of trust-building, confidence-building between Afghanistan and Pakistan," he said.

He said a secure, peaceful and democratic Afghanistan was no threat to Pakistan. "The promotion of extremism" was not in Islamabad's interests, he said, because it too was suffering militant violence.

"So we have started a deep strategic discussion and we will continue to do it...It is a beginning," Rasul said.