Taliban must get space to form new govt: UK army chief

LONDON: The head of the British army Wednesday said the world should give the Taliban the space to form a new government in Afghanistan and may discover that the insurgents cast as militants by the West for decades have become more reasonable.

Nick Carter, Britain's chief of the defence staff, said he was in contact with former Afghan president Hamid Karzai. "We have to be patient, we have to hold our nerve and we have to give them the space to form a government and we have to give them the space to show their credentials," Carter said, according to a British wire service.

"It may be that these Taliban are different to that people remember from the 1990s," he said.

"We may well discover, if we give them the space, that this Taliban are of course more reasonable but what we absolutely have to remember is that they are not a homogenous organisation - the Taliban are a group of disparate tribal figures that come from all over rural Afghanistan," he added.

Carter said the Taliban were essentially "country boys" who lived by "Pashtunwali", the traditional tribal way of life and code of conduct of the Pashtun people.