Against Odds, Path Opens Up for U.S.-Taliban Talks

WASHINGTON ? Over the last year, Marc Grossman, a veteran but low-key diplomat, led a small team of American officials who met secretly from Doha, Qatar, to Munich with a shadowy representative of Afghanistan?s Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, in hopes of starting peace talks.

The Obama administration?s efforts to negotiate an end to the war, initially brokered by Germany?s spy service, showed promise but have been scuttled more than once by rumors, deliberate leaks in Kabul, Islamabad and Washington and the assassination of the top Afghan negotiator in September by a supposed envoy wearing a bomb in his turban, Afghan and Western officials said.

Then, Mr. Grossman and other administration officials were caught by surprise when the Taliban announced last week that they were prepared to take an important step by opening a political office in Qatar.

Now, despite doubts in the administration, misgivings on Capitol Hill and the erratic objections of the most important partner in any potential peace deal ? President Hamid Karzai ? the administration?s best hope for ending the war in Afghanistan has reached a critical juncture. Next week, Mr. Grossman and his team are rushing back to the region to consult with several allies, including Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and if Mr. Karzai gives his blessing, will resume preliminary talks with the Taliban representative before another opportunity slips away.

The Qatar office would be the first of what the officials described as a series of reciprocal steps that could include the release of at least five senior Taliban officials held at the United States prison at Guant�namo Bay, Cuba.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said on Wednesday that the administration was ?still in the preliminary stages of testing whether this can be successful.?

But she went on to say that for the first time there appeared to be support for a political resolution that included leaders of the radical Islamic government that ruthlessly ruled the country from 1996 until the American invasion after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

?The reality is we never have the luxury of negotiating for peace with our friends,? Mrs. Clinton, who has pressed the initiative within the administration, said at the State Department.

?If you?re sitting across the table discussing a peaceful resolution to a conflict, you are sitting across from people who you by definition don?t agree with and who you may previously have been across a battlefield from.?

The negotiations ? potentially as historic and as politically wrenching as the Paris peace talks that ended the Vietnam War ? come after more than a decade of war in Afghanistan and they could unfold in the middle of President Obama?s re-election campaign.

The reversal of the Taliban?s longstanding public refusal to negotiate with the United States ? and the administration?s willingness to reciprocate ? punctuated a highly compartmentalized effort that has proceeded in fits and starts, with the knowledge of very few officials, according to administration and Afghan officials involved in the negotiations. Begun by the American envoy Richard C. Holbrooke, who died in 2010, it has been conducted by his successor as senior representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mr. Grossman, a former ambassador to Turkey who came out of retirement to take on what has been described one of the most difficult jobs in government. His team includes about a half-dozen State Department, Defense Department and intelligence officials.

Only a month ago, when envoys from dozens of countries gathered in Bonn, Germany, hoping to announce a new push for political reconciliation in Afghanistan, the effort appeared moribund. The fiercest opposition came from Mr. Karzai, whose position on the prospect of talks, one senior administration official said, involved wild swings in mood and position.

Under pressure from the administration, however, Mr. Karzai ultimately relented, dropping his objections, though he continued to make demands on the location of any Taliban office until the day after it was announced.

With the United States and NATO already having announced that they would withdraw most international forces from Afghanistan by 2014, the search for some kind of political reconciliation between the new government and the Taliban became an imperative for the administration.

Steven Lee Myers and Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, and Matthew Rosenberg from Kabul, Afghanistan. Charlie Savage contributed reporting from Washington.

Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=4b8b5dfcd0a0baee00394ec42cf9e54e

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