AFGHANISTAN/STATE/TERRORISM/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “The Trump administration is considering a plan that would aim to close the Taliban political office in Qatar, a move that triggered an unusual internal protest by State Department officials who said it would undermine U.S. interests in Afghanistan, according to current and former U.S. officials.
A group of State Department specialists on South Asia filed the rare internal ‘dissent channel cable’ on Friday [9-29-17] to urge that the U.S. keep the Taliban office open and launch more-intensive talks to end the 16-year-old war in Afghanistan, according to people familiar with the move…
The unclassified memo to top State Department leaders urged them to keep the Taliban office open to help ensure that a serious push for peace talks isn’t put on the back burner while the U.S. sends 4,000 more U.S. forces into Afghanistan to try to break a battlefield stalemate with the Taliban.
In the internal memo, the experts said that closing the Taliban office in Qatar could undermine President Donald Trump’s attempts to extricate the U.S. from a war that has claimed more than 3,500 American lives since 2001, according to people familiar with the move…
The embassy of Afghanistan in Washington didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.”
-Dion Nissenbaum, “U.S. Weighs Fate of Taliban Political Office, Prompting Internal Objection,” The Wall Street Journal online, Oct. 1, 2017 05:19pm