U.S. pressures U.N. to end to Taliban sanctions

Washington is pressing the United Nations to end sanctions against 18 former senior Taliban figures in a peace-negotiating gambit, diplomatic officials said. The move, supported by Britain, asks the U.N. Security Council to remove the sanctions as early as this month as a signal to Taliban insurgents that reintegrating into Afghan society is possible if they put down their arms, the officials told The Guardian. The Obama administration and the office of British Prime Minister David Cameron had no immediate comment on the report. The sanctions were imposed by a unanimous Security Council Oct. 15, 1999, when the Taliban were in power, and were expanded after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They ban about 140 people associated with the Taliban from traveling or holding bank accounts. Removing the restrictions has been a key insurgent demand and is supported by the Afghan government. Among the people named as candidates for sanction removal is Mohammed Qalamuddin, the controversial former head of the regime's Vice and Virtue Ministry, or religious police, The Guardian said. The ministry's 30,000 officers were accused of some of the worst atrocities under the Taliban regime. Other candidates include well-known figures who have served as intermediaries between insurgents and the Afghan government. They include Arsala Rahmani, a former Taliban deputy education minister who was also a mujahedin commander during the nine-year war Soviet War in Afghanistan in the 1980s. An Afghan minister told the newspaper lifting the sanctions would help the Taliban establish a political office in a third country because key intermediaries would finally be allowed to travel. Turkey, Turkmenistan and Qatar have all offered to host such an office, Afghan and Western officials in Kabul told The Guardian. Active Taliban would undoubtedly not be among those removed from the sanctions list, officials told the newspaper. "Don't expect to see Mullah Omar [the Taliban's overall leader] among them," one said.