Too early for Taliban talks to play decisive role

Despite hopes that talks with the Taliban could provide the political underpinning for the US staged withdrawal from Afghanistan, the discussions are still not at the stage where they can be a deciding factor.

With Washington due to announce next month how many troops it believes it can safely pull out of Afghanistan, diplomats say that months of talks between the two sides – a crucial building block in any eventual political solution – have  yet to develop into serious negotiations.
“Right now they are gauging each other’s temperature,” said one diplomat who is involved in international discussions about how to reach a political settlement in Afghanistan.
A Western diplomat in Kabul gave a similar account, saying, “There are no serious load-bearing talks going on, a lot of contacts.”
President Barack Obama is expected to announce next month how many troops he plans to withdraw from Afghanistan as part of a commitment to begin reducing the US military presence from July and hand over to Afghan security forces by 2014.
Facing budget pressures at home, and calls to explain why the United States should linger in Afghanistan after killing Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on May 2, Obama is nonetheless expected to argue for maintaining a substantial troop presence.
But his officials have increasingly been holding out the prospect of talks with the Taliban as a way of eventually settling a war now into its 10th year.
“Perhaps this winter the possibility of some kind of political talks on reconciliation might be substantive enough to be able to offer some hope of progress,” outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates said earlier this month.
According to official sources from several countries, Washington began face-to-face meetings with representatives of the Afghan Taliban led by Mullah Mohammed Omar toward the turn of the year, and possibly several months before that.
But so little is known about these contacts that they have been open to widely different interpretations. One diplomat, for example, said there was no substance to recent media reports of US-Taliban talks being hosted in Germany.
The Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until they were ousted for refusing to give up al Qaeda after September 11, 2001, publicly dismiss suggestions they are holding talks, saying that they will not negotiate until foreign troops leave.
But long before bin Laden was killed, they had been signaling a willingness to break with al Qaeda — a key condition for a political settlement — by saying they would not allow Afghanistan to be used to attack other countries.