JNN 23 Nov 2010 Senior Afghan and US officials have confirmed reports of a series of secret peace talks with a fake Taliban leader in Kabul over the past months, a media report says.

According to the New York Times, secret talks between officials and a senior Taliban commander collapsed after Washington concluded they were dealing with an impostor.

The secret high profile talks with Mulla Akhtar Muhammad Mansour — a senior commander of the Taliban — were intended to end the nine-year long war.

However, the man was apparently not Mansour at all.

Western officials intimately involved in the discussions say the negotiator was not even a member of the Taliban leadership.

“It’s not him,” a Western diplomat in Kabul said. “And we gave him a lot of money.”

NATO and Afghan officials say they held three meetings with the man, who had traveled to Afghanistan from neighboring Pakistan.

Based on the report, the fake Taliban leader even met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai at the presidential palace in Kabul.

The report comes as a US delegation has reportedly arrived in Pakistan to hold a secret meeting with pro-Taliban figures.

The meetings are said to be aimed at pushing for talks between Taliban militants and the Afghan government.

The developments come after Karzai called on tribal elders and civic representatives to get together and discuss measures for a national reconciliation.

Karzai recently formed a peace council to lead talks with the Taliban, electing Afghanistan’s former president Burhanuddin Rabbani as chairman of the council.

The newly-established peace council has been making efforts to initiate dialogue with discontented Afghans and militants who have engaged in warfare with the government.

The council has expressed willingness to listen to legitimate demands by the militants.

The development comes after senior officials in the UK floated the idea of making peace with the Taliban whose uprooting was one of the main objectives of the 2001 Us-led invasion.

The US-led invasion was launched with the official objective of curbing militancy and bringing peace and stability to the war-ravaged country.

Anti-war groups have highlighted the fact that Afghanistan remains unstable nine years after the invasion.

The Taliban have repeatedly rejected peace talks, calling for the withdrawal of US-led foreign forces from Afghanistan