Less than a day after the Taliban opened a new political office in Qatar, the prospects for peace talks that it represented for a war-weary Afghanistan faltered.
The Afghan government said Wednesday that it wouldn’t send representatives to Qatar after all, and that it was suspending talks with the United States over a key military pact. The problem: When the Taliban unveiled the new office, a banner made it clear that they were calling themselves the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
That’s the name the Taliban used for Afghanistan during their rule over much of the country from 1996 until the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, and their use of it suggests that they’re claiming to be the true government.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai was not amused.
Just before the Taliban office in Qatar opened Tuesday, Karzai had said he planned to send members of his High Peace Council there to speak for Afghanistan. But the council announced Wednesday that it wouldn’t negotiate with the Taliban while they were operating under that name.
“We oppose the title of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan because such a thing does not exist,” Karzai’s chief spokesman, Aimal Faizi, tweeted Wednesday afternoon.
Secretary of State John Kerry called Karzai twice in the past 24 hours to ease his anger over the way the Taliban announced the opening of the political office in Qatar. The rift has also delayed the announced visit to the region this week by the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
President Barack Obama, who was traveling in Europe Wednesday, downplayed the rift and said he hoped that peace talks would proceed. At a news conference in Germany, he said the U.S. had anticipated “some areas of friction, to put it mildly.”
“I think that President Karzai himself recognizes the need for political reconciliation,” Obama said. “The challenge is how do you get those things started while you’re also at war. And my hope is, and expectation is, is that despite those challenges, the process will proceed.”
The peace talks had been expected to open preliminarily today with discussions between the Taliban and the United States. Afghan representatives were to arrive a few days later.
A spokesman for the peace council said it would study the situation but for the present, at least, wouldn’t engage in any talks.
The Afghan government also announced that it was suspending discussions with the United States over the terms of a bilateral security agreement that would set down specifics of the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan after all combat troops in the NATO-led coalition depart at the end of 2014. The U.S. offense was agreeing to talk with the Taliban while the insurgents were styling themselves as a government.
The crisis over the name was the most recent in a string of setbacks for the prospects of a negotiated settlement. For years, the U.S. government has tried to encourage talks without significant progress, and it’s been a year and a half since the Taliban revealed that they planned to open the Qatar office.
Continuing violence in Afghanistan also undercut talk of peace. The Taliban claimed credit Wednesday for an overnight rocket attack on the largest NATO base, Bagram airfield, north of Kabul. The NATO-led coalition confirmed that indirect fire had killed four of its troops.
And on Tuesday, five Afghan police officers were killed at a security outpost in Helmand province by five of their comrades, officials said, the latest in a string of so-called “insider attacks” that have shaken the confidence of the nascent Afghan security forces.
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