KABUL: Afghan government negotiators are set to leave for Qatar on Friday to begin peace talks with the Taliban to end decades of armed conflict in the country.
The negotiations will start in the Qatari capital Doha from Saturday, six months later then planned due to disagreements over a controversial prisoner exchange between the Taliban and the government.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in a statement on Thursday evening wished the government team success in “their mission to bring sustainable peace and stability to the country, which is the long-awaited aspiration of the people of Afghanistan.”
The intra-Afghan negotiations were initially scheduled to begin in March, after a historic Taliban-US deal signed on Feb. 29, but delays over the swap of prisoners — 5,000 held by the Afghan government and 1,000 by the Taliban — have hindered efforts to get them started.
The exchange was finalized only on Thursday, when six remaining Taliban inmates were freed by Kabul and landed in Qatar. The move prompted the Taliban to immediately announce readiness to hold the talks.
Officials in Kabul confirmed that Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, who heads the High Council for National Reconciliation, and Foreign Minister Haneef Atmar will attend the talks’ opening ceremony.
The Afghan team is led by former intelligence chief, Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, while the Taliban chief negotiator will be Sheikh Abdul Hakim, a hardline cleric who has been serving as the group’s shadow chief justice.
Each of the sides is expected to field 21 negotiators for the talks. There are no women in the Taliban team, while five female delegates will be representing Kabul. One of the women negotiators, Fawzia Koofi, a prominent activist and former lawmaker, told Arab News that the Kabul side will “push for enforcement of a cease-fire or drastic reduction of violence on the agenda of the talks.”
Another negotiator from the government team, speaking privately, said he feared that there would be differences of opinion among the government delegation’s members, giving leverage to the Taliban who will negotiate in a united voice.
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The Afghan team is led by former intelligence chief, Mohammed Masoom Stanekzai, while the Taliban chief negotiator will be Sheikh Abdul Hakim, a hard-line cleric who has been serving as the group’s shadow chief justice.
There has been a general perception that the Taliban will push for the formation of an interim government to sideline President Ghani who began his second term in office in March.
Shafiq Haqpal, an analyst, said that there would be “lots of differences” between the two sides and it would take a great deal of time until they were resolved, “unless there is behind the scene pressure from US to reach a conclusion.”
On Thursday, before sending his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Doha to attend the talks’ inauguration, Trump told reporters that the US “will play an important role in bringing the parties together to end the decades-long war.”
Torek Farhadi, an adviser to the previous Afghan cabinet, said the fact that Trump mentioned the importance of the talks in his press conference on Thursday shows that he wants a speedy result from it to showcase it as a success story for American voters.
Successful intra-Afghan talks would pave the way for a complete withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan by spring next year, in accordance with the US-Taliban February deal. The return of US troops home was also one of Trump’s electoral promises.
“He wants visible results out of the talks in the next 50 days, before US election day,” Farhadi said, referring to Trump’s efforts to be re-elected in November.
