Late in 2007 Michael Semple, an Irishman working as a top official for the European Union in Afghanistan, and Mervyn Patterson, a Briton employed as a political officer for the United Nations in Afghanistan, were ordered by the Afghan government to leave the country. According to various press accounts, President Hamid Karzai gave the order after discovering that Semple and Patterson had been engaged in talks with local Taliban leaders in the province of Helmand without coordination or guidance from Kabul.
Semple, in particular, was no ordinary EU bureaucrat: Fluent in Dari, he had worked in Afghanistan for close to two decades and had, as a result, extensive contacts within the Taliban. And while Semple and Patterson's activities might have been at odds with the policy of Kabul, any number of other sources were reporting that it was consistent with the British government's own efforts at the time to reach out to the Taliban. As one source was quoted as saying, British intelligence "officers were understood to have sought peace directly with the Taliban, with them coming across as some sort of armed militia."
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