Taliban Arrests End Peace Talks

Who would have thought the Taliban doesn’t like having its leaders arrested? The New York Times reports that the recent arrests of several high-ranking Taliban officials in Pakistan has led the group to cut off secret communications channels with the West. That’s bad news for peace negotiations, which the U.N. and the Taliban have been carrying out quietly in Dubai. According to Kai Eide, a former special representative for the U.N. secretary general who stepped down this month, the arrests were “negative on our possibilities to continue the political process that we saw as so necessary at that particular juncture.”