President Hamid Karzai’s chief of staff expressed concern on Thursday about the American role in starting talks with the Taliban, complaining that Afghan officials were not being kept well informed and worrying about the possibility that the Taliban might make “a secret deal” with the United States.
The chief of staff, Abdul Karim Khurram, expressed his views in a rare interview a day after Pakistan canceled a visit by a top American envoy, Marc Grossman, throwing into disarray his efforts to hold talks on peace efforts with regional leaders.
“We have been briefed regularly by the Americans, but we don’t know all the details,” Mr. Khurram said. “We demand more clarity.”
Afghan officials have been smarting over the American effort to allow the Taliban to open an office in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar, as a place where talks could begin. At first, the Afghans rejected the idea, but last month they agreed; the Taliban also accepted the initiative.
“We wanted the office to be in Afghanistan, or if not, in Saudi Arabia or Turkey,” Mr. Khurram said Thursday. “But if the Taliban and America are happy about it, and if it puts an end to the war, and if it puts an end to the killing of Afghans, then we have agreed with Qatar as well.”
Five times during the 45-minute interview in the presidential palace, Mr. Khurram expressed concern about the possibility of “une affaire cachée,” as he put it in French at one point, or some sort of secret or separate deal between the Americans and the Taliban.
“We think if it’s not Afghan-led, the peace process will not be fruitful,” he said. “In case there were a secret deal, we would be concerned about it. If it’s about the peace process, then we are not worried.”
Mr. Khurram said he and Mr. Karzai would express these concerns to Mr. Grossman during his visit to Afghanistan next week.
His comments came on the second of two days of insurgent attacks that killed more than two dozen people in southern Afghanistan. At least seven civilians were killed, including two children who died when a suicide car bomber detonated his explosives on Thursday morning outside a gate at Kandahar air base, one of the largest coalition bases in Afghanistan, American and Afghan officials said. Eight more Afghan civilians were wounded, and the death toll could rise, said Zalmai Ayoubi, a spokesman for the governor of Kandahar.
A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousaf Ahmadi, said the insurgents were behind the attack.
Taliban fighters also attacked a police checkpoint in Now Zad district, in Helmand Province, on Thursday afternoon. At least 2 police officers and 12 Taliban fighters, including a local commander identified as Mullah Abdul Baqi, were killed in the ensuing gun battle, said Dawoud Ahmadi, a spokesman for the provincial governor.
Mr. Grossman, the United States special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, was denied a visa to visit Pakistan and canceled his trip there on Wednesday and went to India instead, a stop that was not previously on his two-week itinerary in the region, according to State Department officials.
He will also visit Qatar next week, according to the State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland. “All of these meetings are focused on the support these countries give to Afghanistan and talking through the process of Afghan-led reconciliation and how we can support the aspirations of Afghans,” Ms. Nuland said at her daily news briefing on Wednesday.
Mr. Khurram said Pakistan’s refusal to receive Mr. Grossman raised questions about how the process could move forward. “Pakistan’s role is important in the peace process and in particular about this Qatar office issue; I don’t know, when he can’t go there, how it will affect the process.”
Because the Taliban’s top leaders live in Pakistan, their travel to Qatar would have to be facilitated by Pakistani officials.
“We asked the Americans whether Pakistan will share in this process,” Mr. Khurram said. “They didn’t give us a meaningful answer.”
Despite those concerns, Mr. Khurram said he was hopeful that the peace process could eventually show results. After the assassination in September of Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former president who led Afghanistan’s High Peace Council, by a suicide bomber posing as a Taliban representative, talks came to a halt. The agreement for the Taliban to open an office in Qatar, meant to serve as an “address” where they could reliably be contacted for talks, was the first sign of any progress.
American officials, too, have insisted that any peace process would have to be Afghan-led, but Taliban intermediaries are known to be insisting on talks with the Americans rather than with the Afghan government, which they have rejected as a “puppet regime.”
The Qatar deal was brokered last year in direct and indirect American talks with Tayeb Agha, a former secretary to the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar. When the Taliban announced their acceptance of opening an office, they insisted that a precondition would be the release of Taliban prisoners from the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Mr. Khurram said he had information that the Taliban’s Qatar office had already started functioning with Taliban officials present, even though it had not been formally inaugurated. The next step, he said, would be the release of prisoners from Guantánamo, which Afghan officials have long favored, although he said he did not know when that step might take place.
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