Ministry of Foreign Affairs has confirmed that Agha Jan Mutasim, Taliban government’s finance minister and a prominent member of the so-called Quetta Shura has gone missing in UAE. Mutasim is said to have been involved in peace talks with the Afghan authorities. It seems as if the best place for any Taliban leader who is desirous to talk peace is Kabul. Everyone knows what happened to Mullah Abdul Ghani Bradar, Taliban’s former second in command and Mullah Abdul Raqeeb, who was also a minister during Taliban regime. The former is decaying in a Pakistani prison and the later was assassinated in Peshawar, Pakistan in February after he had returned from UAE where he reportedly had met Afghan officials over peace process. Now it is Mutasim’s turn.

The reason for disappearance of Mutasim seems to be his optimistic views on peace negotiation. Talking to an Afghan local TV from Ankara in June last year, Mutasim had said that Taliban were prepared to talk peace with Afghan government, provided the parties involved in the Afghan conflict made sincere and honest efforts towards peace negotiations. In August 2010, Mutasim was targeted by assassins and nearly died after advocating that the Taliban should negotiate participation in Afghanistan’s mainstream political process. “My idea was that I wanted a broad-based government, all political parties together and maybe some hard-liners among the Taliban in Afghanistan and in Pakistan didn’t like to hear this and so they attacked me," he said in May, 2012.

Although Mutasim’s views might not have been the views of Taliban leadership, it appears that the Afghan government took his statements as serious. In his 2012 interview to AP, Mustasim expressed the demands of Taliban of negotiation in the following words:  “They want all Afghan prisoners released from U.S.-run detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay and near Bagram Air Field north of the Afghan capital; the names of all Taliban currently on the United Nations sanctions blacklist removed; and recognition of the Taliban as a political party.”And those demands are what the Afghan government has been trying meet. President Hamid Karzai has time and again emphasized on the closure of Guantanamo Bay and release of Taliban prisoners. The Afghan government has done what is in its authority: It has released thousands of Taliban prisoners - most of which were held for being somehow linked to terrorist groups – from Bagram detention facility over the past two years.  On the request of President Karzai certain names of Taliban leader were removed from UN blacklist.

The efforts of Afghan government to initiate direct peace talks with Taliban leadership, however, have been fruitless. It has been disadvantages for some Taliban leaders either. Those with intentions to resolve the Afghan conflict through table talks were either imprisoned or killed. The case of Mutasim is indeed continuation of the same process.