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Reports: Taliban Impostor Involved in Talks

   VOA News 23 November 2010
   Afghan  President  Hamid  Karzai,  during a press conference in Kabul,
   Afghanistan  on 23 Nov 2010. Afghanistan's president is denying he met
   with a senior Taliban leader.

Photo: AP

   Afghan  President  Hamid  Karzai,  during a press conference in Kabul,
   Afghanistan  on 23 Nov 2010. Afghanistan's president is denying he met
   with a senior Taliban leader.

   Officials familiar with the Afghan government's reconciliation efforts
   with the Taliban say a man involved in the secret talks who claimed to
   be one of the Taliban's top commanders was actually an impostor.
   News  reports quote unnamed officials as saying the man claiming to be
   Akhtar Mohammad Mansour was a fraud.
   The  New  York  Times newspaper reports that NATO and Afghan officials
   said they held three meetings with the man. Officials said he was even
   flown  on  a  NATO aircraft to the Afghan capital, Kabul, to meet with
   President Hamid Karzai.
   President Karzai told a news conference in Kabul Tuesday that he never
   met  Mansour.  Karzai  did  not  say  whether he met with a person who
   claimed to be Mansour.
   Reports  of  the  impostor  raise doubts about the state of efforts to
   resolve the nine-year war in Afghanistan.
   Last week, Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar denied that his group was
   negotiating a peace agreement with the Afghan government.
   Omar  called  reports of talks "baseless propaganda" designed to cover
   up what he called the failure of U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan.
   The  alleged  impostor reportedly came from Pakistan, but his identity
   and  possible  motivation  for  posing  as  the  Taliban commander are
   unclear.
   Some  Afghan  officials  suspect he might have been sent by Pakistan's
   intelligence service, the ISI.

   The  New  York  Times was the first to report the story about the fake
   leader in an article published Monday.

   Some information for this report was provided by AP.

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