Senior administration officials hope to use the talks to sow suspicion between the Taliban and their main ally, thus weakening the Taliban resolve to negotiate on a peace settlement only if the United States offers a timetable for troop withdrawal. Afghan and German officials have said that U.S. officials met three times in Qatar and Germany in recent months with Tayyeb Agha, an aide of the top Taliban leader Mullah Omar, according to reports in the Washington Post and Der Spiegel.
Agha is about as close to Mullah Omar as any official in the Taliban. He has long been Omar's "head of office" and a "very close confident", according to Thomas Ruttig of the Afghanistan Analysts Network. The Hamid Karzai regime was fully briefed on those "exploratory" meetings, but Pakistani officials have been kept in the dark as part of a strategy of sowing discord between Pakistan and the Taliban leadership. That strategy began to emerge when UK Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Mark Sedwill visited Pakistan last week. Sedwill told journalists that the Taliban leadership was engaged in talks with "various stakeholders with full backing of the U.S. with the sole aim of finding a solution to Afghanistan from within, without any involvement of foreign players." He was clearly hoping to rattle the Pakistani military leadership and civilian government, which have complained in the past that they have not been told about contacts with the Taliban.
