Taliban meet with Karzai and Abdullah, Ghani says he backs talks

Kabul, Aug 18 (AFP/APP):The Taliban, who have pledged a different sort of rule in Afghanistan from their brutal regime two decades ago, met with former president Hamid Karzai and senior official Abdullah Abdullah Wednesday as they seek to form a government.
The talks came as president Ashraf Ghani — who fled Afghanistan as the insurgents closed in on Kabul at the weekend, sealing their return to power — said from the United Arab Emirates that he supported those negotiations and was in talks to return home.
The Taliban won a lightning victory in a matter of days, taking control of the war-wracked country nearly two decades after being ousted by a US-led invasion in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The group has pledged not to seek revenge against opponents and to respect women’s rights, but there are huge global concerns about their past brutal human rights record, and about tens of thousands of Afghans still trying to flee.
As the Taliban moves to put a government in place, leader Haibatullah Akhundzada has ordered the release of “political detainees”, telling provincial governors to free them “without any restrictions or conditions”, the group said.
Taliban negotiator Anas Haqqani met with Karzai, the first Western-backed leader of Afghanistan after the Taliban’s ouster in 2001, and Abdullah, who had led the government’s peace council, the SITE monitoring group said.
Taliban leaders “have said that they pardoned all former government officials and thus there is no need for anyone to leave the country,” SITE said, after the Taliban published images of Haqqani meeting Karzai in Kabul.
Ghani — who was in the United Arab Emirates, which said it was hosting him and his family “on humanitarian grounds” — said he wanted those negotiations to be a “success”.