Moderate Taliban want peace: US

Moderate Taliban figures have expressed interest in the fragile peace process, the outgoing US ambassador to Afghanistan said Thursday, referring to a deal that appears even more elusive with this summer's rash of suicide attacks and bombings.
Ryan Crocker, who is retiring a year earlier than expected, also said he thinks it's unlikely that the departure of most foreign troops by 2014 will plunge the country into another civil war or prompt a precipitous economic slide.
"I tend to consider those unlikely scenarios," Crocker told The Associated Press in an interview at the US Embassy in Kabul.
Crocker, a soft-spoken, gray-haired diplomat who became the civilian face of America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, said the international community has pledged support for Afghanistan post-2014. And he said minority ethnic political leaders seem more interested in positioning themselves in the next Afghan administration than bracing for a civil war like the one that led to the rise of the Taliban after the Soviet exit in 1989. "Politics is breaking out all over," he said of the uptick in political activity ahead of the Afghan presidential election in 2014. "You don't see many signs of the people saying `Well, it's time to start digging the trenches again."'
The ambassador acknowledged that northern Afghanistan has a lot of militias, but said he didn't think they threatened national unity.
"I think their primary interest has been criminal activity, rather than preparing for the next civil war, which I really don't see coming," he said.
Crocker is retiring from the foreign service after a storied tenure in some of the world's most dangerous hotspots. Without giving specifics, the US State Department said health reasons have forced the 62-year-old envoy to leave Kabul.
Crocker, an Arabic speaker and six-time ambassador who also ran embassies in Iraq, Pakistan, Kuwait, Lebanon and Syria, came out of an earlier retirement in 2011 to take the helm of the embassy at President Barack Obama's request.
He granted the AP the first of several exit interviews he is scheduled to give to news organizations before leaving later this month. The ambassador said that as the spigot of international military and civilian assistance slows, the Afghan economy will "take a dip." But he said the country will have solid security and economic assistance well beyond 2014.