A dispute over a sign has scuttled US plans to launch immediate peace talks with the Taliban.
James Dobbins, the US special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, on Wednesday said the Taliban’s insistence that they be allowed to identify their new office in Qatar as the “Political Office of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan”, the name the group used when it ruled the South Asian nation, has thwarted plans to launch direct negotiations.
“The stumbling block seems to be not so much the meetings, or sequence of meetings, but whether or not they can put back up” the sign, Dobbins told a small group of reporters.
The sign became an obstacle two weeks ago, when the Taliban officially opened its office in Doha, Qatar, part of a significant diplomatic breakthrough that had been years in the making.
American and Afghan officials expected the ceremonial opening to quickly pave the way for direct talks with the Taliban, a process designed to bring the long war in Afghanistan to an end.
Instead, officials from the two nations were surprised when the Taliban raised signs, flags and banners that effectively identified the office as representing a government-in-exile.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai angrily vowed to boycott talks with the Taliban, which US officials hoped to launch last week. And he suspended separate negotiations with the US over a long-term security agreement.
Under pressure, the Taliban removed the signs, took down the flag and even removed the flagpole from the Doha compound. But they are refusing to take part in peace talks until they are allowed to restore the symbols to their office, said Dobbins, a career diplomat who took over the new job in early May.
He said he did not think the Taliban move was an intentional effort to circumvent the agreement. But it is not clear that the misunderstanding can be resolved at the moment.
“I don’t think that the fact that they place importance on how they are called and how they call themselves is a sign that they’re not serious,” he said. “It is an obstacle, and it was an obstacle we thought had been resolved some time ago, but it wasn’t.”
Taliban officials could not immediately be reached for comment. Dobbins said the Taliban thought it would be appropriate for them to use their traditional signs and flags at the office, even though US negotiators made it clear that they should only identify the Doha operation as the political office of the Taliban.
Such diplomatic disputes aren’t new to Dobbins. In 1968, he was a junior officer with the US diplomatic team working on peace talks to end the Vietnam War.
After getting the warring parties to agree to take part in talks, negotiators spent another year wrangling over whether the table for the peace talks should be round or rectangular, he said. It took several more years to secure the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 that allowed the US military to withdraw from Vietnam.
“These kinds of symbols can often be important to those engaged and can become significant obstacles,” he said.
