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Summary
Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said that Taliban associates have been reaching out for talks about ending the war but that formal negotiations are not taking place.Holbrooke spoke a day after a senior NATO official confirmed that the alliance has provided safe passage for Taliban leaders to travel to Kabul for face-to-face talks with the US-backed Afghan government. The account was the most detailed yet of the US and NATO role in the clandestine talks, aimed at bringing an end to the 9-year-old war in Afghanistan. On the various groups operating in the war-torn country, Holbrooke named the Al-Qaeda with which he ruled out any possibility of talks, the Afghan Taliban, which he said seems to be a loose organisation with a very shadowy arrangement. He also named the Pakistani Taliban or the TTP, the Haqqani network, which he called a notorious, separate group of Afghan Taliban inside Pakistan, who do a great deal of the mayhem and carnage inside Afghanistan. Holbrooke declined to further discuss the peace moves in Afghanistan, saying nobody's interests were served by the constant speculation about talks. International troops and Afghan security forces have been putting pressure on the Taliban in recent months in eastern and southern areas where the movement's heartland is located. But despite being heavily outnumbered, the militants have fought back, inflicting record casualties on NATO forces.
