Taliban deny U.S. peace talks

WASHINGTON – The Taliban categorically denied Wednesday that they’re holding negotiations with the United States on a resolution to the decade-old war in Afghanistan, reiterating that they won’t discuss a peace deal while any foreign forces remain in the country.

“Certainly, our country is considered occupied even if one foreign soldier remain on our soil,” the main Afghan insurgent group declared in the English version of a statement published on its website, alemarah-iea.net. “This can’t be acceptable and tolerable to any Afghan.”

News reports that peace talks are under way are “baseless and dubious,” it declared.

The statement renewed uncertainty about President Barack Obama’s strategy for withdrawing all U.S. combat forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, a process that starts this month with the withdrawal of 10,000 American troops by Dec. 31.

Negotiating a political settlement is a key pillar of Obama’s strategy for ending the war. But there has been no apparent progress in at least three meetings held since November 2010 in Germany and Qatar between U.S. diplomats and a former close aide to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar. Some U.S. officials question how much influence the interlocutor, Tayyeb Agha, still wields.

Obama and his top aides assert that conditions are ripe for negotiations, contending that the surge of 33,000 U.S. troops last year has turned the tide against the Taliban-led insurgency and that Afghan security forces will be ready to assume responsibility for security nationwide by the end of 2014.

Efforts to kick-start talks with the Taliban also are being pursued by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Afghan lawmakers and former senior insurgents. But many experts and some U.S. officials are dubious that a peace accord can be achieved – let alone implemented.

With the U.S. slashing its 100,000 forces amid growing public opposition to the war and Obama facing re-election next year, the Taliban have little incentive to negotiate, experts say.

Last month, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged that the United States and allies had had “preliminary” contacts with Taliban members, without specifying details.

In its statement – replete with grammatical and punctuation errors – the Taliban said that the only talks they’ve conducted with unnamed countries involved prisoner swaps. It cited the freeing of 21 South Korean Christian missionaries kidnapped and held for six weeks in 2007 and two French journalists released last week after 18 months in captivity, and said that “direct and indirect contacts” were taking place about other prisoners.

“The rumor about negotiation with America is not more than the talks aimed at the exchange of prisoners,” it said.

The Taliban said that no legitimate insurgent leader has held talks, and that the U.S. has been duped by impostors posing as interlocutors in order to win cash awards. That was an apparent reference to a Pakistani shopkeeper who engaged in talks with the Afghan government last year posing as a senior insurgent leader.