Afghan Officials Consider Own Talks With Taliban

The New York Times

This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers here or use the "Reprints" tool that appears next to any article. Visit www.nytreprints.com for samples and additional information. Order a reprint of this article now.

January 30, 2012
Afghan Officials Consider Own Talks With Taliban
By GRAHAM BOWLEY and DECLAN WALSH

KABUL, Afghanistan — Concerned that it is being left out of potential peace talks between the United States and the Taliban, the Afghan government is pushing to open its own direct negotiations with the insurgent group in Saudi Arabia, Afghan officials said on Monday.

The talks would be separate from efforts by the United States to begin negotiations with the Taliban in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar, where the Taliban is opening an office, the officials said.

It was not clear whether the effort to start parallel talks would succeed or amount to nothing more than an attempt by President Hamid Karzai to regain momentum after feeling sidelined by the American efforts to help open the Qatar office.

“We don’t know the exact timing, but that is something that is being discussed within the government and with the Taliban,” said a senior Afghan official in Kabul who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk publicly about the deliberations.

Mr. Karzai’s office in Kabul would not comment on the possibility of talks in Saudi Arabia.

Afghanistan’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Said Ahmad Omarkhail, said, “The Saudi government is willing to help us in resolving the problems with the Taliban.” Afghanistan had made preparations for talks with Taliban officials in Riyadh, Mr. Omarkhail said, but he made it clear that he had not been told that any meetings were scheduled.

Another Afghan official in Kabul said on Monday that the Taliban preferred Saudi Arabia as a location for talks and that Afghan government officials, including Mr. Karzai, would meet with Taliban representatives there “soon.”

For any talks to be held in Riyadh, the Afghan government would need the agreement of the Saudi government. But senior Western and United States officials doubt the Saudis would want to become involved in open-ended peace talks that have no guarantee of succeeding.

It is also not clear whether the United States would welcome two tracks of talks, especially if it is excluded from one track, though American officials have said often that any negotiations would ultimately have to be “Afghan to Afghan.”

“Our goal is to work ourselves out of a job here,” the State Department’s spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said in Washington on Monday. “Our goal is to get Afghans talking to Afghans to get a process of reconciliation that is among Afghans.”

She declined to discuss the negotiations in detail, but said the question of opening a Taliban office in Qatar was still not decided. The Taliban have yet to say definitively that they intend to engage in any talks. In the past they have insisted that any talks be with the Americans only, and not the Afghan government, which they reject as a “puppet regime.”

However, on Monday a Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, did not deny that there was a plan for talks in Saudi Arabia. “Our stand is silence regarding an ongoing peace dialogue at the moment,” he said.

If there are talks, the role of Pakistan, Afghanistan’s neighbor, remains undecided. Afghan and some Taliban officials have told the United States that they do not want Pakistan to have a full seat at the table. For its part, Pakistan’s military would much prefer Saudi mediation in peace talks. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have strong ties dating to the 1980s, when the Soviets occupied Afghanistan and Riyadh pumped billions of dollars in aid to Afghan rebel groups based in northern Pakistan, and supported a conservative tilt in Pakistani society whose effects endure.

“Our favorites are the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates,” said Tanveer Ahmed Khan, a retired Pakistani diplomat and political commentator. “When it comes to Qatar, there have always been reservations.”

The Taliban, however, may be less keen on Saudi involvement. One of the insurgents’ early demands to American officials was that negotiations not take place in Saudi Arabia, a former Obama administration official said.

“The Taliban specifically wanted the office” in Doha, the capital of Qatar, “because they didn’t want to be under the thumb of the Pakistanis,” said the official.

Analysts said the push for a Saudi office, which was first reported by the BBC, was being driven by Mr. Karzai, who fears being sidelined in American-led talks.

“This is related to Karzai’s frustration and fears,” said Shamila N. Chaudhary, a senior fellow at the New American Foundation, a nonprofit policy group in Washington. “He thinks the Americans are going to hang him out to dry, and that a deal with the Taliban is going to lead to his ouster.

“His talking about the Saudi angle is just a reminder to everyone that he is still relevant to the process,” Ms. Chaudhary said.

Pakistan’s foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, is scheduled to arrive in Kabul on Wednesday, in a bid to heal relations between the two neighbors that collapsed in acrimony last year after the assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, Mr. Karzai’s main envoy to the Taliban.

For weeks, Afghan officials have been fuming over the American efforts to allow the Taliban to open an office in Qatar. At first they said they preferred that discussions take place in Saudi Arabia or Turkey, but this month, after the Taliban accepted the American initiative, Mr. Karzai reluctantly agreed to Qatar.

Several former Taliban officials said that some Taliban negotiators had already begun meeting with American officials in Qatar, to discuss preliminary trust-building measures, including a possible prisoner transfer. As the preliminary talks have progressed, Afghan officials have said they feared a “secret deal” between the United States and the Taliban.

The Obama administration hopes the negotiation process will unfold in three phases — exploratory, confidence-building and political, according to a former administration official who could not speak for attribution because he was not authorized to discuss the talks. The administration considers that first phase to be now drawing to a close.

The exact details of the Taliban “office” in Doha are still being hammered out — where it would be located, for instance, and what format any talks would take. Qatari security services are expected to have a major role in watching over Taliban negotiators, particularly any who may be released from the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay.

“If the detainee transfer goes ahead, and they are sent over there, then they would be heavily monitored. It would probably be a form of house arrest,” said the former Obama official.

The administration’s goal is to establish the Doha office by the time of a NATO summit meeting scheduled to take place in Chicago this May.