MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan -- Afghanistan's hard-line vice president expressed hope Sunday that an upcoming national conference will lay the foundation for peace with insurgents as a dozen civilians died in separate bombings in front-line provinces.
During celebrations in Mazar-I-Sharif, marking the Afghan New Year, Vice President Mohammad Qasim Fahim, who fought the Soviets and commanded forces that overthrow the Taliban in 2001, said a "peace jirga" planned for late April or early May would try to chart a way to reconcile with government opponents.
"The government will try to find a peaceful life for those Afghans who are unhappy," Mr. Fahim said without mentioning the Taliban by name. "God willing, by the help of the people, we will have a successful, historic jirga. . . . My dear countrymen, my hope is that this year will be the year of peaceful stability."
Mr. Fahim's support would be crucial to efforts by President Hamid Karzai to reach a political settlement with Taliban leaders to end the war, now in its ninth year.
Mr. Fahim, who has been critical in the past of any deals with the Taliban, is an ethnic Tajik and former defense minister, while Mr. Karzai and the Taliban leadership are ethnic Pashtuns.
The jirga, an Afghan institution where community leaders meet to take decisions by consensus, is expected to formulate a national strategy for reconciliation talks with the Taliban and their allies.
Talking with the Taliban is gaining support in Afghanistan as thousands of U.S. and NATO reinforcements are streaming in to reverse the Taliban's momentum. That has prompted Pakistan, Iran and others to stake out positions on possible reconciliation negotiations that could mean an endgame to the war.
In an interview broadcast by BBC last Friday, the U.N.'s former envoy to Afghanistan, Norwegian diplomat Kai Eide, said he and other U.N. officials had been in discussions with senior Taliban officials since last year but the dialogue has stopped since the arrests of top Taliban figures in Pakistan.
Mr. Eide criticized Pakistan for arresting the Taliban's No. 2 leader and other members of the insurgency, saying the Pakistanis surely knew the roles these figures had in efforts to find a political settlement. Pakistan denies the arrests were linked to reconciliation talks.
Talk of reconciliation, however, has done little to slow the violence, which has escalated dramatically over the past three years.
