McClatchy's/ here".... The terms that Hekmatyar has outlined are softer than those proposed by the Taliban, who've demanded that U.S. and other foreign troops must leave Afghanistan before peace talks can begin. Hekmatyar would allow international forces to remain in the country for 18 months.... Hekmatyar, 59, a veteran jihadist who fought the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s with U.S. and Pakistani support, now heads the smallest of the three main insurgent groups. The other two, the Taliban and the Haqqani network, are associated with al Qaida.
A deal with Hekmatyar would be controversial, especially with women's groups and human rights activists, who fear that it would jeopardize the hard-won freedoms enshrined in Afghanistan's 2004 constitution.
Hekmatyar's proposal, quietly circulated to the government and selected politicians late last year, would install a "neutral" interim government in Kabul for two years, said Afghan political leaders who've seen the plan but didn't want to be named for fear of their own safety.
During the last four months of the interim government's tenure, a loya jirga, a traditional "grand assembly" of tribal elders and other influential groups, would be convened to draft a new constitution, and then elections would be held. Hekmatyar's group in turn would lay down its arms......
"Hezb-i-Islami is not against peace in Afghanistan. We are not against Karzai and peace talks . . . . We are not seeking any position," Feroz Hekmatyar said. "We want foreigners to leave, to go out of Afghanistan."
Feroz Hekmatyar said he took part in a conference last month in the Maldives, a secret event that brought together Hezb-e-Islami with Taliban figures and several members of parliament and that participants later described in detail to McClatchy.
"Hezb-e-Islami doesn't have any relationship with al Qaida," he added. "Hezb-i-Islami has some political disagreements with the Taliban."....
Hekmatyar is on a United Nations blacklist of terrorists, and that would make negotiations with him difficult. According to the U.S. State Department, he had links with Osama bin Laden and gave the al Qaida leader shelter in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s.....
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was one of the main "mujahedeen" commanders in the U.S.-backed resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
With the support of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency, he then threw his group into the Afghan civil war that followed in the early 1990s, briefly becoming prime minister. Hekmatyar ordered the shelling of Kabul during that period, killing thousands of civilians. He was ousted when the Taliban came to power and fled to exile in Iran in 1997, and later to Pakistan....
Hekmatyar's Pakistani benefactors, who are keen to play a major role in deciding the fate of Afghanistan, may be pushing him into talks.
"He (Hekmatyar) has a weak hand to play and it may be made even weaker if the Pakistanis are putting pressure on him and his people..."
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