Afghan Taliban takes step toward peace talks with US
KABUL — The Taliban’s announcement that it plans to open an office in Qatar for peace talks with the U.S. and its allies marks the first public step toward negotiations to end the decade-long war in Afghanistan, former U.S. officials and analysts said this week.
Contacts between the Obama administration and the Afghan Taliban, who were ousted from power by the U.S. military in late 2001, have been secret and limited to preliminary discussions between a few U.S. and Taliban representatives over whether peace talks were even feasible, according to a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
The Taliban’s announcement Tuesday that it had negotiated to open a liaison office in the Persian Gulf nation may prove to be a watershed because it’s the first time the militant group is publicly acknowledging it wants to talk to the U.S. and is offering a pathway to do so, former officials and analysts said.
“This is a major political step by the Taliban” that will engender resistance from its own hardliners, Vali Nasr, a former senior adviser to the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said in an interview. “If the office materializes, it is a big deal.”
“It doesn’t mean things are going to be solved, but it means they’re coming out of the closet with negotiations,” he said. “It’s going from talking about talks to actually talking.”
Nasr, now a professor of international politics at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., cautioned “that just because they agree to negotiate doesn’t mean this is a ceasefire or that they’ve thrown in the towel.” Just as the Vietcong held talks with the U.S. while continuing to fight the Vietnam War, he said, the Taliban may see negotiations as a way to expedite the drawdown of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, scheduled to occur by the end of 2014.
For the U.S. side, “it would be foolhardy” not to pursue peace talks, however elusive a deal may now seem, he added. “We’re going to leave Afghanistan, so it’s better to help negotiate an agreement with the Afghan Taliban that would make our exit easier” and help stabilize the country “after we leave,” he said.
The Taliban agreed to a preliminary deal, following talks with Qatari officials and other “relevant parties,” to open a liaison office in Qatar, Zabihullah Mujahed, a Taliban spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement Tuesday. The Taliban has asked in exchange for the release of its detainees held at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Taliban said in the statement.
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland declined to comment on the prisoner release demand. She told reporters in Washington that the U.S. is “prepared to support an Afghan-led process of reconciliation” as long as the Taliban renounces violence, breaks ties with al-Qaida and abides by the Afghan constitution, including the protection of women’s rights.
“If this is part of an Afghan-led, Afghan-supported process, and the Afghan government itself believes it can play a constructive role and it is also supported by the host country, then we will play a role in that as well,” she said.
Nuland said U.S. willingness to participate in negotiations doesn’t change its military posture. U.S. troops will continue to fight “enemies of the Afghan government,” she said.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who had protested the creation of a Taliban office in Qatar, last week dropped his opposition.
In contrast to Nuland’s comments, an e-mail statement Wednesday from Karzai’s press office presented the development as a step toward “U.S.-Taliban peace negotiations.”
“To save Afghanistan from war, from civilian killings, and with the aims to reach peace, Afghanistan agrees to U.S.-Taliban peace negotiations and a liaison office in Qatar for the Taliban,” Karzai’s office said in the statement Wednesday.