Afghanistan: CIA Trying to Set Up Talks with Taliban?

An interesting item from an Afghanistan news site. The article, while shaky at points (Central Investigation Agency?), intersects with other stories pointing to a quiet US effort to get Taliban to the negotiating table as well as President Hamid Karzai's public declarations, and has been picked up by analysts such as Juan Cole:

The US proposal to hold talks with the Afghan Taliban leadership, with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia playing the role of mediators, has fallen apart.

The US Central Investigation Agency had been working to hold secret talks with the Taliban leadership, with the help of the Saudi leadership and the General Intelligence Directorate of Saudi Arabia and the Pakistani leadership and the Inter Services Intelligence.

But with the Taliban hell-bent upon fighting the US-led international forces, the initiatives have failed to yield any desired result.

The News has quoted sources as saying the massive trust deficit between the two sides plus Taliban’s obstinacy had rendered the talks useless.

The US recently said it would not be opposed to the idea of holding talks with the Taliban to establish peace in the Afghanistan region.

Of late, the US intelligence services have been attempting to encourage the Taliban to discontinue their ties with Al-Qaeda.

However, sources privy to the issue, have said only middle rank Taliban leaders had agreed to talks, and any decision made by these leaders would not have made any major impact on Afghan insurgency.