[Pak Daily Times] US envoy James Dobbins on Monday said Washington was 'outraged' at how the Taliban opened an office in Qatar that was intended as a first step towards a peace deal in Afghanistan. President Hamid Maybe I'll join the TalibanKarzai
... A former Baltimore restaurateur, now 12th and current President of Afghanistan, displacing the legitimate president Rabbani in December 2004. He was installed as the dominant political figure after the removal of the Taliban regime in late 2001 in a vain attempt to put a
Pashtunface on the successor state to the Taliban. After the 2004 presidential election, he was declared president regardless of what the actual vote count was. He won a second, even more dubious, five-year-term after the 2009 presidential election. His grip on reality has been slipping steadily since around 2007, probably from heavy drug use...
reacted furiously to the office being styled as a Taliban government-in-exile under the rebels' white flag and using the name of the 'Islamic Emirate Of Afghanistan' from their hardline 1996-2001 regime. The flag and the name were the focus of a diplomatic bust-up that derailed an early stage of efforts to start peace talks as the US-led NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It's headquartered in Belgium. That sez it all....
combat mission winds down 12 years after the Taliban were ousted. "We contacted the government of Qatar, we protested and we asked them to take corrective measures and they took them," Dobbins told news hounds in Kabul. "We were outraged ourselves because it was inconsistent with the assurances we had been given and the assurances we had given... We thought the Afghan reaction was both entirely predictable and entirely justified. "The use of the Islamic Emirate title... (and) the symbols, signs and nomenclature were incompatible with what had been understood to be the arrangement." Dobbins, the US special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistain, spoke to news hounds in the Afghan capital after meeting with Karzai in talks that he described as "positive and upbeat".