The woolly declaration they signed gives a sense of how hard peace talks will be
breakthrough, albeit only by the forlorn standards of the 40-year conflict in Afghanistan. After two days of talks with Afghan officials at a posh hotel in Qatar, envoys of the Taliban promised that their insurgents would not attack schools, hospitals or bazaars. The Afghan government, too, said it would try to stop killing civilians. But more important than their woolly resolutions was the fact that the two sides were speaking at all.
Filling in the details will be contentious. Who, for example, will decide what is acceptably Islamic? “People will accept concessions, but they are not going to accept an emirate,” says one Western official. Under the Taliban’s interpretation of democracy, only people with sufficient Islamic knowledge should be allowed to vote. “As you can imagine, all those people are men with white beards.”
Taliban fighters in the field often say they cannot negotiate for anything less than a strictly Islamic system. “Without that Islamic regime, a deal for me personally would offend and dishonour those thousands of Taliban and leaders we sacrificed,” says a commander in Ghazni, a town 150km south of Kabul, the capital.
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