Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s office said that peace talks with the Taliban have recently been held, according to a report from Bloomberg. In a interview with Bloomberg, Aimal Faizi, the director of communications at the Afghan presidency, said "both face-to-face and telephone discussions have been held recently with senior Taliban officials."

But officials are cautioning against reading too much into the three-way talks.

The Wall Street Journal, via Fox News, reported:

A senior Obama administration official said the U.S. had assured Karzai that "all we were interested in was seeing if we could open the door for Afghan-to-Afghan talks."

Bloomberg's report also noted that "impact" may be unlikely:

“Karzai’s latest talks with the Taliban are unlikely to have a directly positive impact on the conflict,” said Waheed Mujda, a former Taliban official who is an analyst at the independent Kabul Center for Strategic Studies. “Karzai himself has met this year in Kabul with Agha Jan Motasim, the former finance minister of the Taliban government” that ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s, Mujda said.

While Motasim also is a relative of Mullah Omar, the movement’s top leader, he has been pushed out of the movement’s current leadership and may not be able to authoritatively represent it, Mujda said in a phone interview.

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