The plan for a political office for Taliban in Qatar is proving difficult to materialize even as all the parties involved including the U.S. and Pakistan are throwing their weights behind the idea. Barely a month ago, Gen. Pasha, chief of Pakistan's principal intelligence agency, the ISI, had a week long visit to Qatar pursuing "back channel" talks with the U.S. after the Afghan border incident in which scores of Pakistani soldiers were killed.

The visit was also focused on preparing the groundwork for transferring a number of Taliban representatives to Qatar and setting up the political office. What transpired since has been the actual transfer of a number of Taliban "representatives" and diplomats to Doha.

The Taliban proudly announced that they have sent some "English-speaking diplomats" to Qatar to parley in the peace talks. It has been months that American agents from both the State Department and the CIA have been engaged in peace talks with the Taliban in Qatar.

However, there are plenty of problems that are holding back the Qatar talks from gaining traction. Qatar, although being highly ambitious and the rising star of the Middle Eastern politics, is a new entrant into the Afghan fray.

Its experience and track record in issues related to Afghanistan is minimal and is dwarfed by those of Saudi Arabia, which has repeatedly shown its unwillingness to wade the muddy waters of the Afghanistan conflict as a mediator. Qatar clearly lacks both the experience and kind of compelling moral and religious authority that is needed to be lent to the overall peace process. Apart from providing a convenient and unhindered turf for the U.S. and its NATO allies to run freely on the chessboard of talks, Qatar is unlikely to be able to accord any major impetus to the beleaguered peace talks. 

The other factor that is undermining the prospects of Qatar talks is the approach that the Taliban have adopted in going ahead with this process. The Taliban have on more than one occasion made it clear that the current talks and outreach are solely for the purpose of securing the release of their prisoners.

So far and over the past one month, they have succeeded in securing assurances from the U.S. that a number of high-ranking former Taliban officials will indeed be freed from the Guantanamo soon. The U.S. government has confirmed that it intends to release a number of high-profile Taliban officials from its detention facility in Guantanamo Bay as an incentive to further the process of talks. 

It is well known for all those who know the Taliban in some measure that this movement has proved itself, case after case, absolutely incapable of committing itself to any binding outcome of any sort of talks and negotiations. Many from the West who were formerly involved in talks with Taliban back in 1990s still remain appalled by this movement and its leaders' absolute indifference and lack of commitment to outcomes of talks.

One example is the case of Karl Inderfurth who worked an the U.S. government's Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs during the Clinton Administration. After his repeated failed bids to commit the former Taliban government to the outcome of many rounds of negotiations that he held with the Taliban leadership, today he has this to say about the Taliban in Foreign Policy Magazine's online blog: "On a scale of one to ten on good faith negotiations, the Taliban proved to be a zero". 

As clearly said by Inderfurth, the Taliban are and will continue to be very unlikely to be able to commit themselves to any serious process of talks and negotiations. The Taliban movement, as an ethno-religious entity, is indeed bent on pushing ahead with its totalitarian worldview and is the least accommodating of other people's legitimate concerns and rights. These are some of the major factors that have been responsible for preventing the Qatar peace talks from gaining traction.

The U.S.'s insistence to keep the monopoly on the peace talks and its apprehension and lack of willingness to genuinely allow other like-minded countries to take a more active part in the process is also another factor. The U.S. seems to be hell-bent on at least securing one outcome from these talks and it is the possibility of reconciling the Taliban's leadership to the idea of an open-ended U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.

This is a particularly sensitive issue especially for Pakistan, Iran, Russia and other countries that have a geo-strategic stake in Afghanistan and the broader central Asian region. Pakistan, despite cooperating with the U.S. in reaching out to the Taliban, remains particularly apprehensive of the American intentions to prolong its stay in Afghanistan in terms of maintaining a limited military presence inside Afghanistan well beyond 2014.

Currently, large-scale military base construction projects are ongoing in Mazar-I Sharif, Kandahar and Herat. According to current and former high-ranking American military officials, these bases will indeed serve as strategic outposts for the U.S./NATO military in post-2014 Afghanistan with possible regional implications.

The current efforts aimed at peace talks including the Qatar round, unfortunately, will get nowhere until there is substantive political will on the part of all involved to genuinely pitch for the root causes of the conflict. If there is any way to salvage the current flawed peace talks, it is for the U.S. to broaden the base of the talks, allow for inclusion of greater number of regional and extra-regional countries and allow the nascent talks to be directed towards a genuine intra-Afghan dialogue.

From Russia, Pakistan and Iran to all those factions and ethnic groups inside Afghanistan whom the Taliban consider as their irreconcilable domestic enemies should be included in the talks at some point in the future. The U.S. may proceed with its current hush-hush attempts at opening paths of dialogue and the fact is that any settlement born out of this flawed model will indeed prove to be temporary and fragile at best.

Seven years from now, we might still have an Afghanistan caught in the flames of war and violence if this historic opportunity slips through the hands of all. At the current juncture, the international community, in its entirety, has a substantive interest in seeing the peace prevail in Afghanistan and this should not be squandered.