Britain doesn't see talks with Taliban for now

ISLAMABAD, Feb 27 (Reuters) Britain does not foresee any chance of dialogue with Taliban leaders running an insurgency in Afghanistan, Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said in Pakistan today.

Beckett said she had no inclination to talk to Taliban commanders whose expressed goals were to kill British troops stationed in Afghanistan.

But, she added that talks with former Taliban or sympathisers who were no longer active might be a possibility in the future.

''That could be a different matter, but I certainly don't envisage some form or process of dialogue at present,'' Beckett said, answering questions after delivering a speech to an audience largely made up of diplomats in the Pakistani capital.

Britain yesterday announced that it will send an extra 1,400 troops to Afghanistan, taking its total force in the country to 7,700. Most of the British troops are stationed in the violent southern province of Helmand.

There are about 45,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, most in a US-led NATO force.

Her remarks came during speculation President Pervez Musharraf has come under intense US pressure to do more to clamp down on Taliban based on its territory, following a surprise visit by US Vice President Dick Cheney yesterday.

There is a considerable body of opinion in Pakistan that the Afghan government and its Western allies will eventually have to engage the Taliban in some kind of dialogue, as containing the guerrilla movement militarily is simply too hard.

The Taliban draws on sympathy from people in impoverished areas of the ethnic Pashtun tribal lands straddling the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, where neither of the governments in Kabul or Islamabad exercise any strong degree of influence.

Beckett said she understood that halting cross-border infiltration by militants along the rugged, 2,400 km frontier posed immense difficulties, and it was up to allies to cooperate with Pakistan to meet the challenge.

She also acknowledged the large number of troops, about 80,000, that Pakistan had deployed in the border areas, and the heavy casualties, more than 700 in the past three years, it had suffered.

Asked whether she concurred with US intelligence assessments that al Qaeda was regrouping in Pakistani tribal areas, the British minister said evidence would have to be assessed.

REUTERS MS BD1447