TALIBAN AND AFGHANISTAN RESUME PEACE TALKS

Afghan delegates f lew to Qatar on Tuesday to reopen peace talks with Taliban leaders amid a rash of mutual recriminations, mixed signals from U.S. officials and a continued spate of assassinations targeting prominent civilians.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. diplomat who brokered a separate U.S. deal with the Taliban in February, arrived in Kabul on Tuesday from Doha, the Qatari capital and Taliban political base. He tweeted that he hoped “both sides” would make “real compromises” that would lead to “tangible progress” in the talks, which began in September but have failed to address any major issues.

But while both Afghan and Taliban officials have issued recent statements saying they were committed to the talks and hoped to settle the 19-year conf lict through discussions, their messages were tinged with anger and blame that boded ill for the new round. Some observers in Kabul predicted that the talks, which are resuming after a two-week holiday hiatus, would probably collapse.

The “demand of Afghanistan’s people is that the bloodshed should end forever in this country,” Massoom Stanekzai, a former national intelligence chief who heads the Kabul delegation, said in a video message posted Tuesday on Twitter. “Afghanistan’s people suffer from the terror that the war has created every day, every night, every moment.”

The Taliban, sidestepping the issue of civilian killings, issued a harsh statement Monday that lashed out at the U.S. government, denouncing what it said were U.S. military airstrikes on civilian areas. It warned that “such pernicious actions” could both threaten their February pact and “jeopardize” progress in resolving issues among Afghans.

American military officials responded with unusual speed and sharpness, saying that U.S. stated policy is to “defend Afghan forces” against Taliban attacks. For the first time, they also directly blamed the insurgents for a recent spate of targeted killings of journalists, civic leaders and government officials.

Taliban spokesmen have denied similar charges by Afghan officials and suggested that they amount to a “survival tactic” by the government of President Ashraf Ghani, who narrowly won reelection last year but has lost public support.

The status of the U.S.-Taliban pact, while seemingly unrelated to the domestic issues of religion, power-sharing and democratic freedoms that Afghan and Taliban leaders are slated to negotiate, is a critical but highly contested factor in the Afghan talks.