An Exploratory Karzai-Taliban Peace Summit?

Thanks to al-Jazeera, footage has emerged of what may be a nascent or exploratory peace negotiation between the Afghan government, the Taliban and a Taliban affiliate and longtime guerilla leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

For months, there have been occasional reports of representatives from the parties to the conflict — one stretching back nine, 15 or 30 years, depending on how continuous you wish to characterize the belligerents as fighting for similar causes — meeting in the Maldives, a placid Indian Ocean island nation neutral in the fight. But now, al-Jazeera cameras have captured images of a man described as an “Afghan governor” and several parliamentarians and foreign-ministry representatives meeting with men described as Taliban and Hekmatyar deputies:

The network reports that the talks are informal. And they come in advance of President Hamid Karzai’s “consultative peace jirga” intended to define the contours of an olive branch to the Taliban — a summit that apparently will be delayed by a week. So even if the Maldives talks are informal, they at least represent a mechanism through which the peace jirga’s terms might be delivered to the insurgents, and through which a response might emerge.

(Via Joshua Foust’s Twitter feed.)