KABUL, Afghanistan, Feb. 16 (UPI) -- Washington, Kabul and the Taliban have begun secret three-way talks that could lead to full-fledged peace negotiations, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said.
U.S. officials confirmed the talks but downplayed their significance, saying they were preliminary.
"There have been contacts between the U.S. government and the Taliban, there have been contacts between the Afghan government and the Taliban, and there have been some contacts that we have made, all of us together, including the Taliban," Karzai told The Wall Street Journal in an interview in Kabul's Arg Presidential Palace.
The Taliban Islamist militant and political group had declared publicly it wouldn't negotiate with Karzai's regime, which the Taliban called a Washington "puppet."
But Karzai brushed off those denials to the Journal Wednesday.
"We were talking to the Taliban, we were talking to the senior-most of them," he said. "We keep hearing in the press from time to time that the Taliban do not want to talk to us, but that's someone making a statement."
He added most Taliban were "definitively" interested in a peace settlement.
Taliban spokesmen had no immediate comment.
U.S. officials told the Journal not to read too much into the talks, which they said began last month to prepare the ground for further contacts.
Karzai would not say where the talks took place or offer further details about them, saying he feared releasing more information could damage the process.
Conditions for Washington-Taliban talks have centered for months on the Taliban opening a peace-talk office in the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar and on confidence-building measures such as a possible U.S. transfer to Qatar of Taliban detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, U.S. and Taliban officials said.
The British newspaper The Guardian reported last month Washington had agreed in principle to free Taliban officials held in Guantanamo to get the Taliban to open the peace-talk office.
Washington had no comment on the report at the time.
President Barack Obama declared in June 2011 the United States had largely achieved its goals in Afghanistan and U.S. troops would be withdrawn by 2014.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Feb. 1 U.S. forces in Afghanistan would step back from a combat role as early as mid-2013.
Karzai told the Journal the Taliban might accept, in the framework of a peace agreement, a deal letting Washington maintain a long-term presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, despite Taliban assertions they would continue fighting as long as a single foreign soldier remained on Afghan soil.
"People in Afghanistan want peace, including the Taliban," Karzai said. "They're also people like we all are. They have families, they have relatives, they have children, they are suffering a tough time.
"There are a lot of people in the Taliban who are the sons of the soil and who do not want this country, the people of this country, to suffer," he said.
Karzai was to meet Thursday with Pakistani and Iranian leaders in Islamabad, Pakistan, to discuss regional security -- all three countries border each other -- including the Taliban.
