“What he meant was mainly more in terms of contacts and people calling each other and saying, ‘We’re ready for talks.’ If you say ‘talks’ in the form of negotiations whereby you sit behind the table and discuss each other’s conditions and discuss how this is going to be taken forward, no, in that form, we have not had comprehensive talks.” —Presidential spokesman Waheed Omar elaborated on Hamid Karzai’s remarks this week that Afghanistan had begun holding peace talks with the Taliban. Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan, had his own clarification about the purported non-talks: “Why the Taliban should talk with Karzai? Who is Karzai?”
