Neighbors Reject Proposal on Taliban

Iran’s foreign minister rejected a U.S. proposal to include members of the hard-line Taliban militia in any future Afghan government, saying Friday that the idea was “unacceptable.”

Russia and India, two allies of the United States in the fight against terrorism, also added their voices in opposition to letting Taliban “moderates” into a broad-based coalition being considered to rule Afghanistan if the Taliban regime collapses under U.S.-led bombardment.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell expressed willingness to include Taliban members in a new Afghan government when he met earlier this week with Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and discussed the future of Afghanistan.

Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi met Tajikistan’s president, Emamali Rakhmonov, on Friday and said both countries opposed the proposal.

“The presence of the Taliban in the new coalition government of Afghanistan is unacceptable,” Kharrazi said.

India and Russia also rejected the idea in a joint statement issued Friday after two days of meetings between Indian officials and Russia’s first deputy foreign minister, Vyacheslav Trubnikov.

Powell has said that any future government would have to be acceptable to Afghanistan’s neighbors. While Pakistan has had ties with the Taliban, Tajikistan is close to the anti-Taliban opposition, which has a strong ethnic Tajik component. Iran is a longtime enemy of the Taliban.