“They seldom come to public events, and when they do, they use aliases,” said Rahmani, who served as deputy education minister when the Taliban controlled Kabul in the late 1990s.
Rahmani said he and Mohammad shook hands but exchanged nothing beyond pleasantries.
“It was not in the typical way Afghans use to greet each other,” he said. “It was done in a very cool manner.”
Rahmani said Mohammad, who was heading the small Taliban delegation, is an influential insurgent leader who is in contact with the top members of the group’s ruling Quetta Shura.
Semple said that although Mohammad is on a U.N. terrorist sanctions list, there has been little public evidence suggesting he is actively involved in running the Afghan insurgency. Mohammad served as deputy commerce minister during the Taliban regime.
Waheed Mozhdah, a political analyst who was with Rabbani’s delegation, said he first learned about the Taliban representatives as he leafed through the conference program and found two names he recognized. The men were listed as representing what was described as the American Opposition Front in Afghanistan: Nik Mohammad and Tayeb Agha.
The latter is an aide to Taliban leader Mohammad Omar and reportedly held talks with U.S. officials this year in Qatar and Germany. Agha apparently stopped talking to Western officials after his role in the talks was disclosed. None of the members of Rabbani’s delegation said they saw Agha, but two noted that some members of the Taliban contingent hid their faces with scarves.
At one point, Mozhdah said, the Iranian hosts asked Rabbani’s team whether it would object to giving the Taliban representatives an opportunity to make public remarks.
“There were various opinions,” said Mozhdah, who worked in the Afghan Foreign Ministry during the Taliban’s reign. “One side said, ‘Let them come and express what they have to say.’ ”
Mozhdah said he objected, arguing to Rabbani that such a move would “damage the relation between Kabul and Tehran.”
The Iranian hosts suggested instead that Rabbani make time to speak privately to the Taliban representatives on the sidelines of the conference, Mozhdah said. In the end, no such discussions took place, said members of Rabbani’s team.
“We feared that if we were to do so, it would show our weakness,” said peace council member Qazi Amin Weqad, who also attended. “We were also scared of getting a negative response, such as, ‘You need to talk to the Quetta Shura.’ ”
A State Department spokesman declined to comment on the Tehran conference. Administration officials have said that Iran has a legitimate interest in Afghanistan and a role to play in promoting regional stability. As part of its own efforts to promote Taliban reconciliation, the Obama administration has sent senior emissaries to all of the countries bordering Afghanistan, except Iran.
Strategic mediation
Iran, a predominantly Shiite nation, supported the Northern Alliance as it fought the Taliban during the 1990s. The Taliban, a hard-line Sunni organization that was in power between 1996 and 2001, came close to war with Iran in 1998 when a number of Iranian diplomats were killed in Afghanistan.
When U.S.-backed Northern Alliance forces toppled the Taliban in late 2001, Iran began to broaden commercial and diplomatic ties with Afghanistan. Iranian leaders have become concerned in recent years that Afghanistan’s insurgency and illicit drugs could spread beyond its western border into Iran.
The presence of Taliban members at the public conference in Tehran appears to have received little notice in Iran, or beyond. But even the limited coverage it got in Iran provides insight into why Iranian leaders decided to invite a Taliban delegation.
An article that appeared Saturday on the influential Iranian news Web site Khabar, which is supportive of the supreme leader, described the presence of Taliban and Afghan government representatives at the conference as a watershed moment.
“Officials who had never gathered in one place were now discussing current issues of the area together,” the article said.
Referring to the U.S. talks with Taliban representatives this year, the piece said: “It should be noted that the radical forces in Afghanistan have not accepted mediations from [the] West.”
Correspondent Thomas Erdbrink in Tehran, staff writer Karen DeYoung in Washington and special correspondent Sayed Salahuddin in Kabul contributed to this report.
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