Afghans, Taliban closer to discussion

KABUL, Afghanistan — This nation’s government said a repeatedly stalled prisoner swap with the Taliban had largely been completed Thursday, potentially removing the final hurdle for direct negotiations with the insurgents to end the country’s long war.

Preparations have been underway for months in Doha, Qatar’s capital, for the two sides to meet there and begin negotiating an end to the war. But the Taliban refused to start those talks until the Afghan government released the last of 5,000 prisoners whom the U.S. had committed to freeing in a deal with the insurgents in February. Instead, it intensified its attacks across Afghanistan.

Javid Faisal, a spokesman for the Afghan national security council, said all but “a few” of the 400 remaining Taliban had been freed after the group released Afghan commandos they had been holding.

The remainder are about a half-dozen prisoners who are said to have killed American, Australian and French citizens and whose release the three countries lobbied to block — even as other U.S. officials pushed the Afghans to speed up the freeing of prisoners.

But Afghan and Taliban officials suggested that a face-saving solution was in the works and that those prisoners were likely to be moved to Qatar for temporary house arrest.

“We expect direct talks to start promptly,” Faisal said.

The prisoner swap has been the most controversial part of a peace framework that the U.S. laid out with the Taliban in February, in talks that excluded the Afghan government. That agreement initiated the departure of the roughly 12,000 remaining U.S. troops in Afghanistan over 14 months, in return for the Taliban’s committing to keeping Afghan territory from being used as a base for international terrorist attacks.