20.06 US Scrambles to Keep Afghan Taliban Plan on Track, Russia Backs Karzai
WASHINGTON, June 19 (RIA Novosti) The United States scrambled Wednesday to salvage plans to bring the Taliban into Afghan peace talks while Russia threw its support squarely behind President Hamid Karzai after he angrily cancelled crucial security talks with Washington.
Speaking at a news conference in Germany, President Barack Obama acknowledged early friction in the US overture to the Taliban while officials in Washington admitted that a planned trip by a senior US official to Qatar to meet Taliban representatives, announced just a day earlier, was now on hold.
This is going to be a difficult process, Obama said at a news conference in Berlin with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The parties there have been fighting for a very long time. And we dont expect that it will be easy for representatives of the Karzai government and the Taliban to begin peace talks as sought by Washington, he said.
Obamas comments came after Karzai, reportedly incensed at the sudden elevation in diplomatic status of the Taliban, announced he was suspending the fourth round of Afghan-US talks on a Bilateral Security Agreement that would govern a security transition for the country after the withdrawal of US forces.
The United States confirmed that part of the problem was the roll-out of a new representative office for the Taliban in Doha, which was intended as a venue outside Afghanistan for discussions between representatives of the United States, the Taliban and the Afghan government.
That office was opened Tuesday bearing the name Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan a wording suggestive of an entity with a diplomatic status akin to statehood in what the United States said was a breach of terms that had been agreed with the Taliban, and which apparently infuriated Karzai.
We do not recognize the name
