Govt seeks Afghan push to find political solution to war

The government on Wednesday called on the Afghan government to intensify efforts and find a political solution with the Taliban to bring the conflict there to an end.

Speaking in the United States, Foreign Secretary David Miliband urged President Hamid Karzai to match international efforts by intensifying a search for a political agreement.

"My argument today is that now is the time for the Afghans to pursue a political settlement with as much vigour and energy as we are pursuing the military and civilian effort," said Miliband.

"The political settlement needs to be external as well as internal, involving all of Afghanistan?s neighbours."

A settlement needed to involve "those parts of the insurgency willing permanently to sever ties with Al-Qaeda, give up their armed struggle and live within the Afghan constitutional framework," he said.

The work of international forces alone would not be enough to secure Afghanistan after more than eight years of war, Miliband told an audience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"While violence of the most murderous, indiscriminate and terrible kind started this Afghan war, politics will bring it to an end on the back of concerted military and civilian effort," he said.

His remarks link into the aims of a peace plan launched by Karzai at a major international conference in London in January, which involves attempts to draw militants back to civilian life with job offers and other incentives.

"Some insurgents are committed to Al-Qaeda's extremist agenda. There will never be reconciliation with them -- they must be beaten back," Miliband said. "But the majority are not. They share conservative Islamic beliefs and, linked to that, strong views about what is a just social order."

It emerged at the London meeting that Kai Eide, then UN Special Representative to Afghanistan, had already met Taliban insurgents in Dubai to explore peace talks.

Miliband also called for the foundations of a new national political framework to be laid at a council of Afghan leaders on April 29.

The number of US and NATO troops is expected to swell to 150,000 later this year, boosted by an American troop surge that Western powers hope will bring an end to the gruelling conflict.

Britain provides the second largest contingent of servicemen after the US, with some 10,000 in the country, and the conflict has so far claimed more than 270 British lives.