Taliban impostor: should MI6 take all the blame?

An unseemly blame game had broken out between the CIA, MI6 and the Afghan government following the embarrassing revelation that an impostor who claimed to be the Taliban's number two commander was allowed to meet the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, to open peace negotiations.

Mohammad Umer Daudzai, Karzai's chief-of-staff, has told the Washington Post that a man claiming to represent Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, number two to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, contacted Afghan officials six to eight months ago. They ignored this man's communications because he was unknown to them.

But British intelligence followed up on the lead and got in contact with Mansour - or, at least, with a man posing as Mansour.

As a result, MI6 agents arranged to transport 'Mansour' from the Pakistani border city of Quetta to Kabul. He was paid up to $500,000 for his efforts to ease negotiations and was allowed to meet several government officials, and on one occasion to visit Karzai in the presidential palace.

Daudzai claims the episode is hugely embarrassing to MI6 and proves that the Afghans should be left to negotiate with the Taliban themselves.

His view that British intelligence agents are totally to blame is supported by a US official who told the Washington Post that the CIA "expressed scepticism early on that this was Mullah Mansour".

But all is not as it seems. A report in the London Times suggests that there are divisions in the Afghan government over who is to blame. It quotes a "senior Afghan government official" as saying, "British intelligence was naïve" but that there was also "wishful thinking on our part".

Backing up the idea that the cock-up wasn't just a British affair is Bill Harris, who until this month was the top US diplomat in southern Afghanistan. He told the Times: "Something this stupid generally requires teamwork."

Yet another unnamed senior official - this one Afghan and no longer in his job - told the Washington Post he thinks Daudzai is using the affair to mount a political attack on the West and that Afghan officials are really responsible for opening negotiations with the impostor.

He says the British did nothing more than provide the logistical support to get 'Mansour' to meetings. Indeed, he questions whether the Mansour who turned up at Karzai's palace was a fake at all, pointing out that the 'impostor' passed ID tests to a 95 per cent level of certainty.

"If he's not the person - and there has never been evidence produced that he is not that person - then [Afghan officials] jumped to a conclusion before looking at the evidence."

Apparently, the US was also involved in the ID verification process.

The confusion surrounding the 'fake Taliban' story is such that the various sources quoted cannot even agree on who the man who met Karzai really was.

Some claim he was a shopkeeper from Quetta, others suggest he was a junior Taliban member - and Daudzai has even floated the idea that he was a Pakistani spy dispatched to "test the system".

The atmosphere among Western intelligence agencies and the Afghan government is summed up beautifully by yet another unnamed Nato official, who told the Times of an ongoing "Operation Egg Not on My Face". ·