Kabul furious at British plan to retrain Taliban

A secret British plan to build military training camps for former Taliban fighters in Helmand province has sent relations between Afghanistan and Britain to an all-time low, officials have revealed. Senior Afghan officials said the government had no knowledge of the attempts to persuade Taliban rebels to switch sides and then train them to fight in local militias until the plan was exposed last December. Western diplomats and Afghan officials were clear that the plan was a UK initiative. The British embassy in Kabul refused to comment on the allegations. Electronic documents outlining the scheme were discovered in the possession of a team of western and Afghan officials who were detained while traveling in Helmand in late December. Two foreign diplomats involved in that mission, Mervyn Patterson, a United Nations political officer, and Michael Semple, deputy head of the European Union mission in Afghanistan, were ordered to leave the country on Christmas day for "threatening national security." Both the UN and the EU denied accusations at the time that the pair had been attempting to negotiate with the Taliban -- although the UN did admit that the men had been meeting figures opposed to the government. Afghan officials and western diplomats, however, revealed to the Financial Times that the plan appeared to have gone much further than that, although they said that Patterson was not involved in the training camp plan. The plan envisaged a camp for 2,000 former Taliban fighters offering vocational training and, more controversially, military training, with the provision of communications equipment, including satellite phones and global positioning systems. One senior Afghan official, who is closely involved in efforts to drain popular support from the Taliban, said the government was furious at having been kept in the dark. "We have operational discussions about these security issues with the international community on a weekly basis, so why did they keep this secret?" the official said. "What was their motive for not telling us?" British officials have sought to distance themselves from the expelled diplomats, saying that neither worked for Britain. Members of the team were carrying business cards claiming they worked for the "European Union Peace Building Program" -- a non-existent initiative. Francesc Vendrell, head of the EU's mission in Kabul, told the BBC last month that he knew Semple was "going to do some work on reconciliation with the Taliban but, beyond that, I had absolutely no idea what he was going to do." Officials in Kabul said anger over the British plan had helped destroy support for the appointment of Paddy Ashdown, former high representative to Bosnia, as UN special representative in Afghanistan. Lord Ashdown withdrew because of the opposition of Afghan president Hamid Karzai.