WASHINGTON: The administration has accelerated direct talks with the
Taliban, initiated several months ago, that U.S. officials say they
hope will enable President Obama to report progress toward a settlement
of the Afghanistan war when he announces troop withdrawals in July.
A
senior Afghan official told Washington Post that a U.S. representative
attended at least three meetings in Qatar and Germany, one as recently
as “eight or nine days ago,” with a Taliban official considered close
to Mohammad Omar, the group’s leader.
State Department
spokesman Michael A. Hammer on Monday declined to comment on the Afghan
official’s assertion, saying the United States had a “broad range of
contacts across Afghanistan and the region, at many levels. We’re not
going to get into the details of those contacts.”
The talks
have proceeded on several tracks, including through nongovernmental
intermediaries and Arab and European governments. The Taliban has made
clear its preference for direct negotiations with the Americans and has
proposed establishing a formal political office, with Qatar under
consideration as a venue, according to U.S. officials.
An
attempt to open talks with the insurgent group failed late last year
when an alleged Taliban leader, secretly flown by NATO to Kabul, turned
out to be a fraud. “Nobody wants to do that again,” a senior Obama
administration official said.
Other earlier meetings between
Afghan government representatives and Taliban delegates faltered when
the self-professed insurgents could not establish their bona fides as
genuine representatives of the group’s leadership.
But the
Obama administration is “getting more sure” that the contacts currently
underway are with those who have a direct line to Omar and influence in
the Pakistan-based Quetta Shura, or ruling council, he heads, according
to one of several senior U.S. officials who discussed the closely held
initiative only on the condition of anonymity.
The officials
cautioned that the discussions were preliminary. But they said
“exploratory” conversations, first reported in February by the New
Yorker magazine, have advanced significantly in terms of the substance
and the willingness of both sides to engage.
Rumors of the
talks have brought a torrent of criticism in recent weeks from Afghan
President Hamid Karzai’s political opponents, who say that he will
ultimately compromise Afghan democracy. In one indication of U.S.
eagerness to get negotiations moving, however, administration officials
described the criticism in positive terms as evidence that Afghans were
starting to take the idea of negotiations seriously.
The
Taliban, one U.S. official said, is “going to have to talk to both the
Afghans and the Americans” if the process is to proceed to the point
that it would significantly affect the level of violence and provide
what the Taliban considers an acceptable share of political power in
Afghanistan.
Such an outcome is likely to be years away,
officials said. They said that the United States has not changed its
insistence that substantive negotiations be Afghan-led. “The Afghans
have been fully briefed” on U.S.-Taliban contacts, an American official
said, and “the Pakistanis only partially so.”
Officials said
representatives from the Haqqani network, a group of Afghan fighters
based in Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal region whom the
administration considers particularly brutal and irreconcilable, have
had no part in the discussions.
Although U.S. officials have
said that Osama bin Laden’s killing by American commandos early this
month could facilitate progress, initiation of the discussions predate
bin Laden’s death. During a Feb. 18 speech, Secretary of State Hillary
Rodham Clinton said the United States and the Afghan government would
no longer insist on a public break between the Afghan Taliban and
al-Qaeda as a precondition for talks. Instead, such a declaration could
be made at the end of negotiations.
The U.S. and Afghan
governments also insist that any settlement process result in an end to
Taliban violence and a willingness to conform to the Afghan
constitution, including respect for the rights of women and minorities
and the rule of law.
Asked what Obama hoped to announce in
July, an official said the president would not offer details of any
talks. “It would be something like this,” the official said. “ ‘Here’s
my plan on troops, here’s my overall vision for Afghanistan. The
secretary [Clinton] said we were going to produce some diplomacy and
laid out our desire to speak to the enemy. .. I want to tell the
American people .?.?. we’re making that policy real.’ ”
The
Taliban has transmitted its own list of demands, most of them
long-standing, another official said. They include the release of up to
20 fighters detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — eight of whom are
thought to be designated “high value” by the United States and two of
whom have been designated for trials by military commissions —
withdrawal of all foreign troops from Afghanistan, and a comprehensive
guarantee of a substantive Taliban role in the Afghan government.
The
Taliban proposal of a formal office has raised two immediate questions,
one U.S. official said. “One, where is it? Second, what do you call it?
Does it say ‘Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’ across the door? No. Some
people say you can call it a U.N. support office and the Taliban can go
sit there.’ ”
“If the Afghans want it in Kabul, that’s okay,” the official said. “If they would support it in Qatar, that’s fine.”
Events
over the past six months have contributed to the administration’s
determination to get substantive talks underway as well as its belief
that a successful political outcome is possible, even if still years
away.
In a November meeting, NATO contributors to the
140,000-troop coalition in Afghanistan — all under economic and
political pressure to end the long-running war — set the end of 2014 as
the deadline for a complete withdrawal of combat troops. By that time,
they said, enough Afghan government forces would be recruited and
trained to take over their country’s security.
Obama had
announced that he would begin drawing down U.S. forces, who form about
two-thirds of the international coalition in Afghanistan, in July. The
U.S. budget crisis, which prompted the election of more deficit hawks
last fall, brought increasing political pressure on the administration
to decrease the $10 billion monthly bill for the war.
On the
ground in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the coalition military
commander, has cited increasing progress against Taliban fighters in
the south, although there is some disagreement with the U.S. military’s
conclusion that heavy losses have made the Taliban more amenable to
negotiations. U.S. intelligence officials have offered a slightly
different interpretation, saying that replacement commanders inside
Afghanistan have made the Pakistan-based leadership nervous of losing
control over its fighters and more anxious to make a deal.
Officials
said senior diplomat Marc Grossman, who was appointed as the
administration’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan
after Richard C. Holbrooke’s death in December, was told that the White
House expected him to concentrate his efforts on a negotiated
settlement.
At the same time, U.S. relations with Pakistan —
the home base for the leading Afghan Taliban groups — have become
increasingly frayed. The endgame in Afghanistan clearly requires
Pakistani cooperation, and Grossman began trilateral discussions on the
subject with top Afghan and Pakistani diplomats in Islamabad, the
Pakistani capital, this month. Officials said that he has also visited
other regional players interested in talks, including India and Saudi
Arabia, and that Iran has been approached through intermediaries.
The
administration now thinks that talks with the Quetta Shura and other
groups do not necessarily require Pakistan’s cooperation.
“Some
people who have met with the Taliban say that among the reasons [the
insurgents] want to establish their own office is so they can get out
from under the Pakistanis,” one senior administration official said. Online
