U.S. to Resume Talks With Taliban

Paging Hamid Karzai. The Obama administration announced that it will resume talks with the Taliban—provided the Afghan president does not have a problem, a senior official told The Washington Post. In December, a U.S.-Taliban deal that would have transferred five Afghan detainees from Guantánamo Bay to Qatar fell apart after Karzai said he wouldn’t support it. While the U.S., Afghanistan, and the Taliban have said they are all for opening a Taliban office in Qatar, talks have not taken place since the falling out. The U.S. has maintained that talks with the Taliban must be Afghan-led, though some officials say the Taliban is not willing to sit down and talk to Afghanistan.