Uzbekistan Foreign Minister Aziz Kamilov said there is no military solution to the Afghan conflict, reiterating that the Taliban must sit down for talks with the Afghan government.
“We have different visions here in the region… We must know about the Afghan crisis that there is no military solution,” Kamilov said in an interview with Dennis Wholey on This is America and the World on June 25.
He said that “Afghanistan must be an integrated part of Central Asia, one single common region.”
“It is necessary to have a regional and international common approach towards the peace process in Afghanistan,” he said.
He said that Uzbekistan supports any format for negotiations, whether they take place in Doha, Turkey or elsewhere, adding that Uzbekistan was the first country to establish direct contact with the leaders of the Taliban.
“The question is what will be the political system in Afghanistan,” he said, reiterating that Uzbekistan will not accept the return of a government like the Taliban’s in the late 1990s.
“Of course, we cannot accept something which Afghanistan had in the 90s, an Islamic emirate of Afghanistan, but at the same time we think that this problem must be solved on the basis of mutual compromise between the government – the existing government – and between the military opposition, Taliban and others,” he said.
However, he affirmed that Islamic values must be respected.
Kamilov noted that the international community should have both sides reach an agreement on peace.
He emphasized the importance of connectivity in the region and said “our idea is to connect this region through Afghanistan.”
He said that the Taliban is not a terrorist organization outside Afghanistan because the group has no record of terrorist attacks beyond Afghanistan’s borders.
“Sometimes people say the Taliban’s movement is a terrorist organization. Of course, maybe they had some contacts within Afghanistan with different extremist organizations, but at the same time, we cannot give an example of the Taliban over the past 40 years organizing some terrorist attack beyond the national borders of Afghanistan, neither in Central Asia, nor in Europe or somewhere else,” he said.
He added that he does not see the Taliban as a terrorist organization because the group has signed a peace deal with the United States.
