US seeks prisoner swap deal with Taliban: report

The US has decided to resume talks with the Afghan Taliban but it would be confined to a deal over swapping five prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay for an American soldier believed to be held captive in Pakistan, a media report said today.

In an effort to free American captive Bowe Bergdahl before the bulk of US forces leave Afghanistan this year, the Obama administration has decided to try to resume talks with the Taliban and sweeten an offer to trade Taliban prisoners, The Washington Post reported citing officials.

"Five members of the Afghan Taliban who have been held at Guantanamo for years would be released to protective custody in Qatar in exchange for the release of Bergdahl, who was captured in Afghanistan in 2009 and is thought to be held in Pakistan by the Haqqani network, an allied insurgent group," the report said.

Two people familiar with the decision were cited by the daily as saying that it was the Taliban that broke off negotiations nearly two years ago and that the US door to talks has been open since.

The renewed offer has not been formally made, and no State Department or other officials have immediate plans to travel to Doha, Qatar, where any contact facilitated by the Qatari government would take place.

To refresh the American offer, which has been on the table for more than two years, senior officials from the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies decided within the past month to allow the simultaneous release of all five men detained at Guantanamo Bay.

The Pentagon press secretary, Rear Admiral John Kirby, said Friday that US officials are eager to get Bergdahl back.

"He's been gone too long," Kirby told reporters during a briefing. "We want him back. We've never stopped trying to bring that about. He's never far from anyone's mind here."

The mid-January decision by officials would confine any new talks to the prisoner issue, the report said.

Negotiations would not attempt wider engagement with the Taliban on a host of issues related to the future of Afghanistan, it said.

US officials had once hoped to use the prisoner exchange as a means to build confidence for those larger discussions, which would also have involved the Afghan government. Now, the United States is primarily focused on getting Bergdahl home, the report said.

The Taliban broke off talks before they ever really began in 2012, and an effort to resurrect negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government last year ended in an embarrassing shambles.

A political office promised to the Taliban was readied in Doha but closed two days after it opened in June amid a row over the raising of a flag the Taliban used when it ruled Afghanistan prior to the 2001 US invasion.