WASHINGTON — Contrary to news reports of high-level talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government, there are no significant peace negotiations in Afghanistan, U.S. officials and Afghanistan experts said Thursday.
They said the reports, which appeared in a number of U.S. media outlets, could be part of a U.S. “information strategy” to divide and weaken the Taliban leadership.
“This is a psychological operation, plain and simple,” said a U.S. official with firsthand knowledge of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s outreach effort.
Exaggerating the significance of contacts between Karzai’s government and the Taliban “is an effort to sow distrust within the insurgency, to make insurgents suspicious with each other and to send them on witch hunts looking for traitors who want to negotiate with the enemy,” said the U.S. official. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
Ali Jalali, a scholar at the National Defense University and a former Afghan interior minister who maintains close contacts with the Afghan government, said he knew of no significant peace negotiations.
He acknowledged a desire by the Afghan government and its foreign supporters for talks with the Taliban and others, “but the situation is not ready for these talks yet,” he said. “There is a lot of smoke, but no fire.”
News accounts have said the talks with the Afghan government were held in Kabul and that the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force facilitated travel for the Taliban from their sanctuaries in Pakistan.
The reports said the talks had deliberately excluded Mullah Mohammad Omar, head of the Quetta Shura, the leadership council that controls Taliban forces in southern and eastern Afghanistan from the western Pakistani city of Quetta, and circumvented the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency.
U.S. intelligence believes the ISI supports the Taliban and the allied Haqqani network, which Pakistan denies.
A Department of Defense spokeswoman said she could not comment on the allegation of an “information operation.” She also would not say whether there had been high-level peace talks.
“That’s really something for the Afghan government to discuss,” she said.
