US in peace talks with Taliban says Afghan President

In his latest speech Karzai said the Afghan push towards peace talks had not yet reached a stage where the government and insurgents were meeting, but their representatives had been in touch.

“Peace talks are going on with the Taliban. The foreign military and especially the United States itself is going ahead with these negotiations,” Karzai said.

“The peace negotiations between (the) Afghan government and the Taliban movement are not yet based on a certain agenda or physical (meetings), there are contacts established.”

The US Embassy in Afghanistan declined immediate comment.

Karzai was speaking the day after the UN Security Council split the UN sanctions list for Taliban and al-Qaeda figures into two, which envoys said could help induce the Taliban into talks on a peace deal in Afghanistan.

Watch the video: Jon Snow interviews Hamid Karzai on the Taliban

But despite hopes that talks with the Taliban could provide the political underpinning for the US staged withdrawal from Afghanistan, the discussions are still not at the stage where they can be a deciding factor.

Diplomats admit there have been months of preliminary talks between the two sides, but the US has never confirmed any contacts. And so little is known about the exchanges that they have been open to widely different interpretations.

There are also many Afghans, among them women’s and civil society activists, who fear talks with the insurgents could undo much of the progress they have made since the 2001 ouster of the Taliban government.

The closest anyone in the US establishment has come to publicly acknowledging efforts to kick-start talks was when Defense Secretary Robert Gates said this month there could be political talks with the Taliban by the end of this year, if the NATO alliance kept making military advances on the ground.