Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan's president, has said that the US is involved in preliminary peace talks with the Taliban - the first official confirmation that Washington is in discussions with insurgents.
Karzai made the announcement shortly before suicide bombers stormed a police station near the presidential palace in Kabul on Saturday, killing nine people in the worst attack in the capital for a year.
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Karzai had earlier said that the Afghan government, the US and other powers were involved in preliminary discussions with the Taliban. "Peace talks have started with them already and it is going well. Foreign militaries, especially the United States of America, are going ahead with these negotiations," Mr Karzai said.
Mr Karzai said that the moves towards talks had not yet reached a stage where the government and insurgents were meeting in person, but that their representatives had been in contact.
The Obama administration has increasingly emphasised the need for an Afghan-led process to negotiate an end to the war as Nato countries prepare to hand over responsibility for fighting the Taliban to Afghan forces by 2014.
However, Karzai's remarks appeared to confirm that the US is directly involved in contacts with insurgents. The US embassy in Kabul did not comment.
Barack Obama, the US president, made an unusually explicit endorsement of the need for talks last month, telling a BBC interviewer that there needed to be a political settlement to the war. "Ultimately, it means talking to the Taliban," he said.
The renewed focus on talks comes as the Obama administration debates how many troops to start withdrawing from Afghanistan in July. Obama is committed to start pulling back some of a surge of 30,000 US troops deployed last year, though his administration has yet to agree on the scale and scope of the reduction.
Nato is due to start handing over primary responsibility for security next month, with Afghan forces due to take the lead in several provinces. The change will be more one of symbol than substance, however, with Nato forces still doing the bulk of the fighting in the south and east.
The attack on the police station in central Kabul on Saturday underscored the insurgents' ability to sow terror in urban areas. The interior ministry said that three police officers, one intelligence agent and five civilians were killed. Last month, a suicide bomber infiltrated the main Afghan military hospital in the capital, killingsix medical students.
Western powers, increasingly weary of the war, have placed growing faith in the idea of peace talks to guarantee a measure of stability in Afghanistan when Nato leaves, in spite of the immense obstacles in reconciling the warring sides.
In the hope of promoting dialogue, the United Nations Security Council decided this week to treat al-Qaeda and the Taliban separately when applying UN sanctions on individuals.
The move aims to make it easier to foster negotiations with the Taliban by recognising the movement's agenda is focused on winning power in Afghanistan, as distinct from al Qaeda's ambitions to wage a global jihad against the west.
Preliminary contacts between the Afghan government and various networks of insurgents have taken place throughout the 10-year war in Afghanistan and have yielded scant success, hindered by mutual suspicion and the gulf in agendas between the Taliban and the western-backed government in Kabul.
The complexities of identifying viable interlocutors were exposed last year when Nato flew a supposed Taliban leader to Kabul for negotiations with Mr Karzai's government - only to discover that the man was an imposter.
US officials have expressed their hope that the killing of Osama bin Laden, the founder of al Qaeda, by US special forces last month could prompt Taliban leaders into talks by increasing their concerns over their own security.
However, relations between the US and Pakistan have plunged to new lows in the wake of the raid, raising questions over how far Pakistan's military, which exerts strong leverage over Afghan insurgents operating from its territory, might be prepared to facilitate dialogue.
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