NATO aids Afghan-Taliban talks

While the talks involve senior members of the Taliban, officials emphasized that they are preliminary and that they cannot tell how serious the insurgents — or the weak government of President Hamid Karzai — are about reaching an accord.

But comments by administration officials in Washington and a senior NATO official in Brussels yesterday indicated that the United States was doing more to encourage a peaceful settlement in Afghanistan than officials had previously disclosed, which might reflect growing pessimism that the buildup of US forces there will produce decisive gains against the Taliban insurgency.

The NATO official confirmed that “there has been outreach by very senior members of the Taliban to the highest levels of the Afghan government.’’

Although the talks are preliminary, he said, the prospect of negotiating a settlement to the war effort, now nine years old, is alluring enough that personnel from NATO nations in Afghanistan “have indeed facilitated to various degrees the contacts’’ by allowing Taliban leaders to travel to the Afghanistan capital.

Karzai has been trying for many months to persuade Taliban leaders to join his government, and those efforts intensified late last year after President Obama said he intended to begin scaling back US troop levels in Afghanistan by the summer of 2011. US officials had earlier insisted that such talks were a sideshow to the main war effort and that they were unlikely to produce results until the Taliban felt weakened by the intensified NATO assault.

Now, some officials appear eager to show that they are pursuing a new approach in Afghanistan that explores a possible political settlement, even as the military tries to step up pressure on the Taliban.

The top US commander in Afghanistan, General David H. Petraeus, told reporters in Afghanistan recently that high-level Taliban leaders were reaching out to senior Afghan officials to start discussions. Petraeus seems determined to show progress on achieving US goals in Afghanistan — both military and political — ahead of a December review of the war effort ordered by Obama.

Support for talks also comes as US officials have expressed a growing frustration with the complex role played by Pakistan, which provides a safe haven for many insurgents and has ambitions of dictating the postwar political situation in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has insisted that any lasting solution in Afghanistan must involve reconciliation with the Taliban and has urged the United States to participate in peace talks.

At the same time, Pakistan has disrupted some efforts by Karzai to reach out to Taliban leaders hiding there, presumably because he made those overtures without Pakistan’s approval.

In Washington, officials have been cautious about the prospects for a peaceful settlement. One senior US official noted recently that the Taliban, while war-weary, had little incentive to make concessions because they still had the sense that they could outlast the American presence in the country.

Obama signed off on a policy early this year that talks were possible as long as Taliban leaders, at the end of the process, agreed to renounce violence, lay down their arms, and pledge fidelity to the Afghan Constitution.

As recently as August, two senior US officials said, Obama was updated on the progress of those efforts, officials said, and reaffirmed that the United States should aid the process, even if the Taliban involved in the talks represented only breakaway factions of the insurgent group.