Afghans, Taliban initiate talks
KABUL, Afghanistan — After years of failed efforts, an Afghan government delegation met with Taliban officials in the Pakistani capital Tuesday, in a significant effort to open formal peace negotiations, according to Afghan, Pakistani and Western officials.
The Islamabad meeting was the most promising contact between the two sides in years, and it followed a series of less formal encounters between various Afghan officials and Taliban representatives on the sidelines of international conferences.
The Taliban denied or played down those meetings, but by late Tuesday night had not issued any statement confirming or denying the Islamabad session.
A peace process that would lead to the Taliban ending their insurgency has long been seen as a crucial part of the U.S. strategy to stabilize Afghanistan after a long and costly 14-year war. But
previous promising moments in that effort, including the formal opening of a Taliban political office in Qatar in 2013, either fizzled or backfired, with the insurgents expressing more interest in meeting with U.S. officials than Afghan government representatives in any case.
Now, even as the Taliban are making some of their biggest gains on the battlefield in years, they have appeared more willing to talk than ever before. Some Western and Afghan officials see that shift as evidence of the Taliban’s long-term inability to dominate the entire country by force even if they have succeeded in capturing parts of it.
On the Afghan side, officials said the delegation was led by Hekmat Karzai, the deputy foreign minister and a prominent cousin of the previous Afghan president. Other members of the delegation included a member of the government’s high peace council, and several important regional representatives, officials said.
On the Taliban side, however, it was unclear who was attending. Afghan and Western officials characterized the insurgent representatives as midlevel but significant, including some Taliban officials who had gone to the less-formal talks.
Afghan and Western officials said that officials from the United States and China were at the meeting as observers Tuesday, and were expected to attend a follow-up session Wednesday. China has played a growing role in trying to broker peace talks in recent months.
President Barack Obama’s spokesman, Josh Earnest, said the White House welcomed the talks, calling them “an important step in advancing prospects for a credible peace.”
The meeting in Islamabad was an important victory for Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani, who has spent considerable political capital over the past seven months trying to persuade Pakistan to help bring the Taliban to the table.
Still, expectations for concrete results are not high. The Afghan government and its foreign backers are likely to consider the meeting a success even if the only point of agreement is to meet again in the future, regardless of whether the fighting continues or escalates, according to one senior Western diplomat. The diplomat spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering colleagues, amid concern that the Taliban would be less forthcoming if word of the talks leaked out.
Afghan officials said the talks were mainly to set up a framework for further discussions, including setting up confidencebuilding measures both sides should take, and listing possible issues for negotiation.
The diplomat said that the Afghan government did not expect the meeting to have much effect on the fierce fighting currently underway, but that it hoped it could yield a framework for future discussions in the coming months.
In a telephone interview in June, a member of the Taliban delegation in Qatar, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the increase in informal diplomatic meetings in recent months was a natural outgrowth of the insurgents’ stronger military position.
“Political progress is connected to military progress,” the Taliban official said. “The more the military achievements increase, the more the political efforts and activities increase.”