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CAIRO – The UN wants Afghanistan to seek the removal of senior Taliban leaders from an international black list of terrorists so as to pave the way for talks with the emboldened group.

"I think the time has come to do it," Kai Eide, the head of the UN mission in Afghanistan, told the New York Times.

Eide said Afghan officials should seek the removal of some Taliban leaders from the UN’s black list of terrorists, which includes 144 Taliban leaders, including its supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.

Under UN Resolution 1267, governments are obliged to freeze the bank accounts of those on the list and prevent them from traveling.

Some believe the black list has prevented Taliban leaders from entering into negotiations because they would be arrested if they showed their faces.

The request to remove the names from the UN list can only be made by the Kabul government.

"If you want relevant results, then you have to talk to the relevant person in authority," Eide believes.

Taliban ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until being ousted in the 2001 US invasion.

Since then, they have been launching guerrilla warfare against the foreign troops and the West-backed Kabul government.

A recent report by the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) said Taliban had widened its influence to cover almost all Afghanistan.

Future Role

Arsalan Rahmani, a former Taliban deputy minister, agrees that removing Taliban leaders from the UN terrorist list would help open the way for peace talks.

"This would allow the Taliban to appear in public," Rahmani, who now lives in the Afghan capital, told the NY Times.

"It would allow the possibility of starting negotiations in a third country."

US General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, sees eventual Taliban peace deal.

"As a soldier, my personal feeling is that there’s been enough fighting," he said in an interview with the Financial Times.

McChrystal hopes the deployment of 30,000 additional US troops could bring a "negotiated peace" with the Taliban.

He even accepts that Taliban can be part of the future Kabul government. "I think any Afghans can play a role if they focus on the future, and not the past."

A plan to reach out to Taliban dominated talks between Afghanistan and Pakistan leaders Hamid Karzai and Asif Zardari during a summit in Istanbul on Monday.

American, Afghan and NATO leaders are also preparing an ambitious program to persuade Taliban fighters to lay down arms in exchange for schooling and jobs.

The plan, expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, will be the focus of an international conference on Afghanistan this week in London.

But Eide, the UN representative in Afghanistan, doubts that the plan would be the answer.

"I don’t believe it’s as simple as saying that these are people who are unemployed, and if we find them employment they will go our way," he asserted. "Reintegration by itself is not enough."