Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, a top security aide to President Karzai and the secretary of the Afghan Peace Council, says that talks are ongoing with certain unnamed members of Taliban.
“We’re in touch, we talk all the time,” Stanekzai insisted. Taliban officials have denied that any such talks are ongoing, which Stanekzai likewise dismissed as a comment for “political reasons.”
The comments came just as the US announced another $50 million donation to the “reconciliation efforts.” The timing suggests that they too may have been made largely for “political reasons.”
But the history of claimed peace talks is not particularly strong, with previous negotiations never quite what they are initially made out to be publicly, and other times entirely illusory. One time an extremely promising multi-month series of talks turned out to be a plot by a shopkeeper to bilk the reconciliation fund out of money.
Of course Karzai is negotiating with the Taliban- everybody in the region is negotiating with them. He knows who is going to come out on top in the fight for Afghanistan- the Taliban- and he's not about to burn any of his bridges with them. Given the situation on the ground, I would do the same if I were in his shoes. As much as Karzai is a US-installed puppet, he's slowly cutting those ties and making friends elsewhere- a very good move for him, no doubt about it. He has no doubt seen how the US treats their puppets once they are through with them (use 'em up, spit 'em out) and he wants at least part of a soft place to land when it happens to him.
yeah, this has been going on for a while now