http://blogs.reuters.com/pakistan/2011/06/18/taliban-talks-the-new-mirage-in-afghanistan/Afghan President Hamid Karzai has just said in public what many have been saying for months in private, that the United States is holding talks with the Taliban to try to reach a settlement to the decade-long war in Afghanistan. “Peace talks are going on with the Taliban. The foreign military and especially the United States itself is going ahead with these negotiations,” he said in a speech in Kabul.
We have been hearing reports about these talks for months. In the climate of disinformation that threads through the Afghan war, it is hard to say exactly when they started, but I first heard last November that the Americans had begun direct talks with representatives of the Taliban and if that was correct, they must have begun some time before that.
Such direct talks have long been promoted by many Afghan experts as a necessary but not sufficient condition for a political settlement. While western countries have argued that political reconciliation must be Afghan-led, the Americans are the power-brokers, and unlike the administration in Kabul, the only ones who have the authority to deliver on any concessions agreed in the negotiations.
And the United States has also shifted its position on the Taliban — effectively admitting that the movement can be treated separately from al Qaeda by convincing the U.N. Security Council to split its sanctions list imposing asset freezes and travel restrictions into two.
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