All Sides Seeking Negotiations In Afghanistan
The New York Times reports:
KABUL, Afghanistan — As American troops press the Taliban in their desert and mountain redoubts, Western diplomats, Taliban leaders and the Afghan government have begun to take a hard look at what it would take to start a negotiation to end the fighting.
Efforts to start peace talks have yielded little in the past. Nonetheless, interest in a political track is growing as pressure mounts to find a palatable way to reduce the military commitment here and as public support for the war ebbs in the United States and Europe.
“The environment is shifting,” said a Western diplomat here, who echoed a number of others interviewed. “If the Taliban make a decision they are interested, things could move quite quickly.”
Publicly, at least, the Taliban have always stated that they will not negotiate before foreign troops leave the country. Now, however, some Taliban leaders have signaled that they will be open to talks sooner if their security can be guaranteed, and rank-and-file fighters appear increasingly eager to see an end to the war.
For their part, United States officials have also been adamant that they will not talk to top Taliban or other insurgent leaders they consider to be “irreconcilable.” But recently they have quietly begun reducing the obstacles to talks.
In February, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a speech at the Asia Society in New York, appeared to recast longstanding preconditions for talks: that the insurgents lay down their arms, accept the Afghan Constitution and separate from Al Qaeda. Instead, she described them as “necessary outcomes.”
Officially, the State Department played down the change in language, but a senior Western diplomat in Washington, who was familiar with the strategy behind Mrs. Clinton’s speech, said: “It was not intentional to explicitly make preconditions into outcomes. But the text now leaves room for interpretation, which opens doors.”
Intentional or not, the speech was read in Kabul as giving a green light to other Western countries to start laying the groundwork for talks.
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