What Can Result Out Of The Taliban Peace Talks
US and Taliban officials involved in the signing of a historic agreement in February in Qatar studiously avoided referring to it as a peace deal.
Over the weeks that followed it was clear why. While attacks by the insurgents on international troops stopped, fighting with Afghan security forces continued.
The agreement set out a provisional timetable for the withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan, providing the Taliban prevented international jihadist groups such as al-Qaeda from using their territory to attack the US or its allies.
It also committed the Taliban to beginning direct negotiations for the first time with the Afghan government and other Afghan leaders to try to reach a political settlement.
Those talks are now set to begin in Qatar this week, aiming to put an end to two decades of war and the loss of thousands of lives. They were meant to begin in March, but instead were held up for months by wrangling over a prisoner exchange plan.
The US-Taliban agreement promised "up to 5,000" Taliban prisoners would be set free by the Afghan government ahead of the negotiations, in return for 1,000 members of the security forces held by the militants.
In a sign of how uncompromising the Taliban have been throughout the process, the group insisted that exactly 5,000 prisoners should be freed, and that only detainees named on a list by the group would be counted.
The government, which hadn't been part of the US-Taliban talks, resisted. Afghan officials hoped they could extract some concessions out of the Taliban in return for the prisoners. But instead the Taliban raised the levels of violence.
Annexes to the US-Taliban agreement, never made public, were intended to set some limits to the fighting. According to a well-placed source, the Taliban were allowed to continue operations in rural areas, but not in major cities.
Meanwhile, the US would only be allowed to conduct air strikes within a specific distance of active battlefield operations, not on Taliban fighters resting in camps or villages. This left the Taliban free to increase attacks on Afghan forces manning more remote checkpoints.
In any case, the group, at times, did carry out large-scale attacks in some cities, perhaps waiting to see how the Americans would respond, while upping the pressure on the Afghan government. There has also been a spate of targeted assassination attempts on pro-government figures, many of which have gone suspiciously unclaimed.
Eventually President Ashraf Ghani relented, freeing all but 400 of the inmates, who he alleged were responsible for particularly serious crimes.
Even after the decision was made to release them, further delays followed. In part because the Afghan government demanded a number of soldiers held by the Taliban should also be freed, in part because France and Australia objected to the release of a handful of prisoners who had been involved in killing their nationals.
The US, however, grew increasingly frustrated, and the remaining prisoners were freed last week, while plans have been drawn up to send the seven who are linked to attacks on foreign forces to Qatar, where they will be kept under surveillance.
The next stage of the process, talks between the Taliban and Afghan government, or "intra-Afghan negotiations", will revolve around an actual "peace deal".
Officials, and indeed ordinary Afghans, hope a ceasefire can be agreed although, until now, the Taliban have seemed determined to continue fighting until their demands are met.
They see violence as their best form of leverage, and are cautious of allowing their fighters to lay down their weapons, in case it becomes difficult to redeploy them or they drift towards rival militants in the Islamic State group.
Negotiators will also try to establish some kind of agreement on a political future for the country.
