Taliban emissary fake, say officials

 KABUL, Afghanistan – If it sounded too good to be true, that’s because it apparently was. Afghan officials and Western diplomats acknowledged Tuesday that a man claiming to be a senior Taliban leader, who was flown to the Afghan capital in a NATO aircraft for talks earlier this year, was almost certainly an impostor.

 The incident was an embarrassment for Western military intelligence and for the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, both of whom were at least temporarily taken in by the ruse.

 And it underscored the difficulties that lie ahead if efforts continue to engage the insurgents in talks.

 The Karzai government and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have signaled that after nine years of war some form of political settlement is probably the only real chance for a durable peace.

 The Taliban movement all along has issued strenuous public denials that meetings between emissaries of the movement and the Karzai government have been taking place.

 But U.S. officials in recent months had been speaking more openly about contacts between the insurgency and the Afghan administration – some involving “very high-level Taliban leaders,” Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of Western troops in Afghanistan, said in September.

 The man in question was believed by Western and Afghan officials at the time of the talks to have been Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, a senior member of the Taliban leadership hierarchy. The meetings were first reported by the New York Times, which also reported Tuesday that Western officials had concluded that the man representing himself as Mansour was not in fact him.

Los Angeles Times