Former Afghan prime minister Gulbadin Hekmatyar speaking at the press conference on Saturday.—AFP
Former Afghan prime minister Gulbadin Hekmatyar speaking at the press conference on Saturday.—AFP

KABUL: Former Afghan prime minister Gulbadin Hekmatyar on Saturday rejected any increase in US troops and said elections were the only way to bring stability to Afghanistan.

Also on Saturday, two Afghan police officers were killed and a Nato soldier was wounded in an apparent insider attack in southern Afghanistan, officials said.

The 70-year-old former warlord told reporters that the country desperately needed “a strong central government led by a powerful president”.

“Without this it is impossible to bring peace and stability to the country,” Hekmatyar said in his first press conference with foreign media since returning to Afghanistan after more than twenty years in exile.

Two Afghan policemen, a Nato soldier killed in attack

He is back in the political mainstream after returning to Afghan public life in April due to a landmark, but hugely controversial, peace deal he signed with the Kabul government.

“The Hezb-i-Islami is ready to cooperate with the government and bring in security and stability unconditionally,” Hekmatyar said, referring to the largely dormant militant group he heads.

“We accept that elections should be the only way to get to power and the participation of political parties in elections is the only way forward,” he added.

Hekmatyar also said that Donald Trump would be wrong to send more American troops to Afghanistan, something the United States president is believed to be considering.

America has about 8,400 soldiers in the country, well below their presence of more than 100,000 six years ago.

“The current war cannot be won by increasing the number of foreign troops,” he said.

“We want the international community to help Afghans stop foreigners and neighbours from interfering,” he added.

Hekmatyar is one of several controversial figures that Kabul has sought to reintegrate in the post-Taliban era. General Abdul Rashid Dostum, another warlord, is Afghanistan’s first vice president.

The peace deal Hekmatyar signed with Kabul in September, in return for judicial immunity, was Afghanistan’s first such agreement since the Taliban launched their insurgency in 2001.

It marked a symbolic victory for President Ashraf Ghani, who has struggled to revive peace talks with the more powerful Taliban.

Hekmatyar, a prominent anti-Soviet commander in the 1980s, fled Afghanistan as the Taliban took power in 1996. During his exile he was believed to be in hiding in Iran and perhaps Pakistan, but his group claimed he remained in Afghanistan.

Hekmatyar dismissed fears that fighters of the militant Islamic State (IS) group, on the back foot in Iraq and Syria, were arriving in Afghanistan. “The Daesh (IS) fighters in Afghanistan used to be with the Taliban,” he claimed, adding that they had just changed the flag they were fighting under.

‘Insider attack’

The so called “green on blue” attack happened at Kandahar airfield when Nato advisers, who had completed a training session with their Afghan counterparts, were returning to their base, Nato said.

“Romanian soldiers... returned fire in self-defence and killed the gunman,” the statement said, adding that the attacker was a member of the Afghan National Civil Order Police.

A Romanian soldier was wounded in the attack, Nato said.

Police spokesman Abdul Hamid Mubarez said that foreign troops opened fire on their forces after a “verbal clash” with them. He said one police officer was killed at the scene and another who was wounded died later in hospital.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack but Western officials say most insider attacks stem from personal grudges and cultural misunderstandings rather than insurgent plots.

The incident comes as the United States ponders sending more American troops to Afghanistan and it came at the end of a difficult week for foreign forces in the war-torn country.

Two US soldiers died when a Taliban suicide bomber rammed a vehicle filled with explosives into their convoy in Kandahar on Wednesday.

The next day a Georgian soldier was killed in a Taliban suicide bomb attack on a convoy of foreign forces near Bagram Airbase.

In June, three US troops were killed and another wounded in an insider attack during a joint operation in Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar province.

Published in Dawn, August 6th, 2017

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