An Irishman who was expelled from Afghanistan in December for holding talks with Taliban figures as part of what he says was a reconciliation strategy approved by the Afghan government says he hopes to return to continue his work there.
Michael Semple was acting head of the EU's mission to Afghanistan when he and Mervyn Patterson, a Briton working for the UN, were told to leave the country on the orders of President Hamid Karzai. The Afghan authorities said they had engaged in activities "that were not their jobs".
Mr Semple told The Irish Times during a visit to Dublin yesterday that he had been working on reconciliation strategies approved by the Afghan government. "What that involves is trying to reach out to people who are directly or indirectly involved in the insurgency to bring them back into the fold so they stop fighting and reach some sort of accommodation which allows them to come into the existing political order.
"It involves an awful lot of talking and listening, an awful lot of drinking tea and trying to understand. It is about finding common ground between the actors of the conflict, far more than any of them would have imagined existed."
Asked what he thought were the reasons for his expulsion, Mr Semple said: "The most accurate description I've read so far is 'manufactured outrage'. Everything I was doing was authorised, co-ordinated and above board so that could not possibly be the reason why they threw us out. But ultimately it's not up to me to speculate on why the Afghan government does what it does.
"The hope is that it will be solved as soon as possible and I will be back working there again. Having spent almost 20 years working in the country and always trying to do good there, I don't intend for it to be cut short like that."
Mr Semple said that the "speculation and disinformation" surrounding his expulsion, including claims that he and Mr Patterson had paid Taliban members and that they had attempted to broker a deal behind Mr Karzai's back, was not worth commenting on.
Mr Semple also dismissed reports he had held talks with Mansoor Dadullah, a senior Taliban commander captured by Pakistani security forces earlier this week. "It is my job to establish contacts throughout Afghan society including people who are directly or indirectly associated with the insurgency but I never got to Dadullah," he said.
"My impression from the contact work tells me that the substantial proportion of the people currently involved in the conflict are motivated by local grievances and are not irreconcilably wedded to the insurgency. The essence of the work is to try to split those people away from the hardcore of the insurgency and the irreconcilables."
Mr Semple, who gave a lecture on his reconciliation work at the Unitarian Church in Dublin last night, described his assessment of the situation in Afghanistan as "somewhere half-way between the position described by the optimists and the pessimists".
"Those saying everything's fine and on track are wrong because of course it's not, but those saying that the whole country is supporting the insurgency have also got it wrong."