To reduce fuel consumption and exhaust emissions in hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), it is important to develop a well-organized energy management system (EMS). This paper proposes a torque control strategy coupled with optimization for a parallel HEV. A torque control strategy is developed first. In particular, a function to control the driving condition, called the internal combustion engine (ICE) torque control function, is introduced. This function controls the driving conditions (electric motor (EM) driving, ICE driving, and ICE driving assisted by EM) for reducing fuel consumption and exhaust emissions. This function depends on several design variables that should be optimized. Numerical simulation of HEV using Matlab/Simulink is so computationally intensive that a sequential approximate optimization (SAO) using a radial basis function network (RBF) is adopted to determine the optimal values of these design variables. As the result, the optimal ICE torque control function is determined with a small number of simulation runs. In this paper, CO2 and NOx emissions are minimized simultaneously for reducing the fuel consumption and exhaust emission. Through numerical simulations using typical driving cycles, the trade-off between CO2 and NOx emissions is clarified and the validity of the proposed torque control strategy coupled with the proposed optimization is examined.