Washington:
Over the last year, Marc Grossman, a veteran but low-key diplomat, led a small team of American officials who met secretly from Doha, Qatar, to Munich with a shadowy representative of Afghanistan's Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, in hopes of starting peace talks.
The Obama administration's efforts to negotiate an end to the war, initially brokered by Germany's spy service, showed promise but have been scuttled more than once by rumors, deliberate leaks in Kabul, Islamabad and Washington and the assassination of the top Afghan negotiator in September by a supposed envoy wearing a bomb in his turban, Afghan and Western officials said.
Then, Mr. Grossman and other administration officials were caught by surprise when the Taliban announced last week that they were prepared to take an important step by opening a political office in Qatar.
Now, despite doubts in the administration, misgivings on Capitol Hill and the erratic objections of the most important partner in any potential peace deal - President Hamid Karzai - the administration's best hope for ending the war in Afghanistan has reached a critical juncture. Next week, Mr. Grossman and his team are rushing back to the region to consult with several allies, including Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and if Mr. Karzai gives his blessing, will resume preliminary talks with the Taliban representative before another opportunity slips away.
The Qatar office would be the first of what the officials described as a series of reciprocal steps that could include the release of at least five senior Taliban officials held at the United States prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said on Wednesday that the administration was "still in the preliminary stages of testing whether this can be successful."
But she went on to say that for the first time there appeared to be support for a political resolution that included leaders of the radical Islamic government that ruthlessly ruled the country from 1996 until the American invasion after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"The reality is we never have the luxury of negotiating for peace with our friends," Mrs. Clinton, who has pressed the initiative within the administration, said at the State Department.
"If you're sitting across the table discussing a peaceful resolution to a conflict, you are sitting across from people who you by definition don't agree with and who you may previously have been across a battlefield from."
The negotiations - potentially as historic and as politically wrenching as the Paris peace talks that ended the Vietnam War - come after more than a decade of war in Afghanistan and they could unfold in the middle of President Obama's re-election campaign.
The reversal of the Taliban's longstanding public refusal to negotiate with the United States - and the administration's willingness to reciprocate - punctuated a highly compartmentalised effort that has proceeded in fits and starts, with the knowledge of very few officials, according to administration and Afghan officials involved in the negotiations. Begun by the American envoy Richard C. Holbrooke, who died in 2010, it has been conducted by his successor as senior representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mr. Grossman, a former ambassador to Turkey who came out of retirement to take on what has been described as one of the most difficult jobs in government. His team includes about a half-dozen State Department, Defense Department and intelligence officials.
Only a month ago, when envoys from dozens of countries gathered in Bonn, Germany, hoping to announce a new push for political reconciliation in Afghanistan, the effort appeared moribund. The fiercest opposition came from Mr. Karzai, whose position on the prospect of talks, one senior administration official said, involved wild swings in mood and position.
Under pressure from the administration, however, Mr. Karzai ultimately relented, dropping his objections, though he continued to make demands on the location of any Taliban office until the day after it was announced.
With the United States and NATO already having announced that they would withdraw most international forces from Afghanistan by 2014, the search for some kind of political reconciliation between the new government and the Taliban became an imperative for the administration.
Nearly a year ago, Mrs. Clinton first signaled the opening for talks by recasting the administration's longstanding preconditions: that the insurgents lay down their arms, accept the Afghan Constitution and separate from Al Qaeda. Instead, she described them as "necessary outcomes."
By then, Germany's intelligence agency had already brokered a meeting in Munich in November 2010 between the Americans and Tayeb Agha, an English-speaking former aide and spokesman for the Taliban's leader, Mullah Omar, who is believed to remain in hiding in Pakistan.
Initially, the Americans were wary, having been recently embarrassed by an imposter posing as a top Taliban envoy (who ultimately made off with tens of thousands of dollars in payments).
The killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan last May added momentum to the peace efforts, underscoring the increasingly limited ties between Al Qaeda and the remaining Taliban. One of the conditions that the United States has sought is a Taliban renunciation of Al Qaeda and international terrorism.
Over the course of what officials described as several meetings, Mr. Agha verified his true identity and connection to the Taliban leadership in hiding by posting a prearranged message on a Web site used by the group, according to the officials.
That led Mr. Grossman, a veteran diplomat whose style has been far more low-key than the flamboyant Mr. Holbrooke's, to meet with Mr. Agha personally in October in Doha, Qatar, to discuss "confidence building" measures, including the opening of a political office.
Then things ground to a halt. Mr. Karzai, still angered by the killing the month before of the official in charge of reconciliation, Burhanuddin Rabbani, balked at the prospects of a Taliban office in Qatar. Mr. Karzai has often reacted angrily to diplomatic efforts that he perceives are under way without sufficient consultations. His aides in this case said he was properly notified.
Mrs. Clinton and other officials have repeatedly said publicly that any reconciliation effort must be led by the Afghans themselves, and yet privately they have pressed very hard for the Afghans to do so, the officials said.
"I don't think it's a secret that we need the Afghans - we need Karzai to be part of this," said a Western diplomat in Kabul. Is he? "He says so. We'll have to see."
The situation pivoted sharply shortly after Christmas, officials and Western diplomats in Kabul said. In meetings up and down Afghan government, American and other Western officials made the stakes clear: if President Karzai wanted to leave a peace deal in place when his final term ends in 2014, this was his best chance. The Americans wanted the Qatar office to happen, the Europeans were on board and, most important, it appeared the Taliban's leadership was willing.
A senior Afghan official acknowledged "divisions" in the presidential palace over the matter between those with pro-Western sympathies within President Karzai's inner circle, and those whose wariness of America and its objectives in Afghanistan runs deep.
The official said that even though Mr. Karzai agreed to the Qatar office in the days after Christmas, he remained "uncertain" about whether the Taliban were sincere. That skepticism is shared by many in Washington.
"What actually ends up unfolding and what understandings are reached to launch something more visible and serious - all of that has not been fully determined yet," a senior administration official familiar with the effort said.
As the process becomes more visible it is likely to face more intense scrutiny, especially on Capitol Hill. The release of high-level Taliban leaders from Guantanamo would certainly risk a political backlash in an election year. To criticize Mr. Obama for trying to close the prison, Republicans often point to instances in which some former detainees took part in terrorist or insurgent activity, and lawmakers from both parties tied the administration's hands even further by imposing new restrictions on transfers.
A Taliban transfer could be the trial run of that system, and administration officials are studying the most recent version as they consider the deal. It requires the secretary of defense and the secretary of state to certify to Congress that the government to which a detainee would be transferred has certain steps to ensure that the detainee will not engage in terrorist activity.
Such a certification must take place 30 days before any transfer. While the administration provided a classified briefing to leaders of the Armed Services and Intelligence Committees about aspects of the reconciliation talks proposal late last year, it has apparently not yet made any formal certification.
Rather than releasing the five Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, the idea appears to be a transfer to the custody of Qatar, whose government would keep them under some form of control - like surveillance, house arrest and blocking them from travel abroad. Those conditions remain subject to negotiation.
Mrs. Clinton, who met with Qatar's prime minister at the State Department on Wednesday, said no transfers were imminent.
Even now, the officials said, much remains uncertain, including the role of Pakistan in any negotiations, as well as the willingness of any of the sides to come to terms on meaningful, lasting reconciliation that would protect what the United States considers nonnegotiable: a peaceful, democratic government that preserves the gains made over the last decade.
Syed Muhammad Akbar Agha, a former Taliban commander who lives in Kabul and a cousin of the administration's liaison with the Taliban, Mr. Agha, said in an interview that the former government now sought peace, even if it remained committed to its Islamic vision of Afghanistan.
"The Taliban want peace like all of our Afghan brothers and sisters," he said. "We believe in Islam, and we believe that Afghanistan should be an Islamic state. But the Taliban do not think that they can bring a true Islamic state only by force. We can bring those changes in many ways - by negotiating, by speaking."