New scenery for breaking the ice with the Taliban

Paris, Dec 30: A year that began with hopes that the Taliban were ready to start talking peace is ending with a final initiative — informal talks outside Paris among Afghanistan’s competing factions, including militants — that, if anything, exemplifies how little progress has been made in 2012 toward opening negotiations to end the war.

The talks, which began and are to last two days, have been trumpeted as the first time the Taliban have sat down with their former enemies in Afghanistan’s old Northern Alliance, a collection of militias that fought Taliban rule in the 1990s and eventually helped the United States oust the Islamist movement. Afghan government peace negotiators are also attending, as are representatives of Hezb-e-Islami, an insurgent faction independent of the Taliban.

But going into the meetings, both the Taliban and many old Northern Alliance leaders were clear about their lack of expectations. Abdullah Abdullah, an opposition politician and former presidential candidate who draws much of his support from Afghanistan’s north, said the meetings were “not by any chance a breakthrough.”

The talks, which are closed to the news media, are meant to offer participants an informal occasion to “project themselves toward the horizon of 2020,” said Camille Grand, the director of the Foundation for Strategic Research, the Paris-based research group that organized the meetings. The Afghans in attendance have come on a personal basis, Mr. Grand said.

A handful of French defense and foreign affairs officials are participating as well, he said, though the French, who recently pulled their combat forces from Afghanistan, say the meetings do not represent an effort to open formal talks. Philippe Lalliot, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, described them as an “academic seminar.”

Mr. Abdullah, the opposition politician, opted to remain in Kabul and send lesser-known members of his party, the National Coalition of Afghanistan, to attend instead. A rival opposition group, the National Front of Afghanistan, which is also made up largely of old Northern Alliance leaders, was sending two of its top leaders to Paris.

Mr. Abdullah and others among the old Northern Alliance nonetheless held out the possibility that the talks could lead to more. The Taliban “will come there, and they will make their own decisions clear,” Mr. Abdullah said in an interview in Kabul. “I don’t want to be pessimistic, but I don’t want to raise expectations out of the meeting.”

The small Taliban delegation in Paris was being led by Shahabuddin Delawar, who is expected to be one of the insurgents’ negotiators should peace talks ever begin in earnest. But neither Mr. Delawar nor any other Taliban representatives who had gone to Paris were there to discuss the stalled peace process, said Zabiullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the insurgents.

Rather, Mr. Delawar’s sole task was “to shed light on our stances and explain our official position and policies to the international community,” Mr. Mujahid said. “We want to explain it directly through our own official representatives to the international community, while in the past our position has been presented by the enemies, who were trying to display a wrong image.”

He did not elaborate on what those positions might be. The Taliban have repeatedly said they would not negotiate directly with the government of President Hamid Karzai, whom they deride as a puppet of the United States.

The Taliban suspended its preliminary talks with the United States in March after the Obama administration failed to push through a proposed prisoner swap, which was to be the first in a series of confidence-building measures. In the exchange, five insurgent leaders imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, would have been traded for the sole American soldier known to be held by the Taliban, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

The Taliban prisoners were to be sent to Qatar, where the insurgents were to then open a negotiating office.

American officials have said in recent months that they planned to revive the prisoner swap, and the Taliban have repeatedly emphasized that would be the first step necessary to restart the talks. But there have been no apparent moves to release the Taliban prisoners.

The Afghan government has tried to open a variety of other channels to the Taliban. Each has ended in failure, but recent overtures to Pakistan by Mr. Karzai’s High Peace Council have shown some progress.

The council, along with American officials, has been trying to gain support for peace talks from Pakistan, which has aided and sheltered the Taliban over the past dozen years, though it keeps a close watch on the group’s leading figures. Last month, Pakistan agreed to release some Taliban leaders imprisoned there, and nine have been freed, the Taliban and council members said.

What effect, if any, the releases will have on the Paris meetings is unclear. Two similar meetings have been held here since November 2011, but Taliban representatives did not attend.

Mr. Karzai, when asked about the meetings in Paris at a news conference this week, offered only a subdued endorsement, saying the government supports all meetings that could further the goal of reaching a peaceful settlement.

But Mr. Karzai, who late last year nearly scuttled American efforts to open talks with the Taliban in Qatar after complaining he had not been kept abreast of developments, also suggested there could be other motives for the Paris meetings, though he did not elaborate.

Mr. Karzai has bristled in the past when former Northern Alliance members, including some who are at the Paris talks, have held high-profile meetings outside Afghanistan. After a meeting in January in Berlin between former Northern Alliance leaders and United States Congress members, for instance, he accused Washington of plotting to dismember Afghanistan.

“Unless it is proven to us that a meeting has other purposes rather than peace, we are supporting all the peace meetings,” he said at the news conference this week. “But when it has been proven to us or we suspect that these meetings are following other goals, and the goal is not to bring peace in our country — that the meeting has other purposes — then we could talk about that.”

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