‘US backs Taliban office in Qatar’

The United States has thrown its weight behind a plan for the Taliban to open a political office in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar by the end of 2011, a report says.

The move would pave the way for the West to start formal talks with the Taliban, Western diplomats told British daily The Times.

The office would be the first for the Taliban since its fall in 2001 following a US-led invasion of Afghanistan.

The United States has insisted that the office should be located somewhere outside Pakistan, where it can be “treated like a political party,” and Qatar is believed to have accepted to host the headquarters, an unnamed Western diplomat told the daily.

Meanwhile, the Taliban says it wants assurances that its agents would be free from the threat of harassment or arrest in the Qatari capital, Doha.

The initiative follows more than a year of intermittent informal talks between Western diplomats and Tayyab Agha, a senior representative of the Taliban.

The US government has held secret talks with the Taliban group and even with the Haqqani network, which is widely viewed by American and NATO forces as their biggest security challenge in Afghanistan.