If the Taliban wanted to send a message about how serious they are about talking peace it could not have been louder. Over the course of two days, a suicide car bomb in the south and a daylong battle in the east killed a total of six Americans and at least 11 Afghan children.

The suicide attack on Saturday hit a delegation of Americans and Afghan officials on their way to open a school in the south. Among those killed was Anne Smedinghoff, 25, a promising diplomat who was delivering books. On the other side of the country to the east, a 24-hour battle in Kunar province between militants holed up in a house and American-backed, Afghan soldiers killed 20 Afghans, including small children. Efforts over the last three months on the part of the Americans to get the Taliban and Afghan government back to the table in Qatar and bring the war to an end have gone nowhere. A much-hyped Taliban office in the Qatari capital of Doha hasn’t opened yet. What is holding the militants and the Afghan government back?

The Taliban leadership faces a dilemma, said Michael Semple, a fellow at the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. They can join the Afghan political process before NATO withdraws its soldiers in 2014 or fight in the hope of grabbing power once the alliance leaves, he said.

“For the moment they have chosen the latter course,” he said.

But it is a risky decision because the militants will be held responsible for civilian deaths for two years and lose some of the legitimacy they enjoy by claiming to fight the foreign occupation, he added.

“Many Taliban are aware the Afghan population wants peace,” said Semple.

For the Afghan government the issue is control. The latest failed talks took place two weeks ago when Karzai flew to Qatar with an agenda that included a written agreement that any office the Taliban opened would not be used for fundraising or become an unofficial Taliban embassy, wrote Thomas Ruttig, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, on his blog.

“Kabul wants to avoid any sign that the Taliban were an equal party in the conflict, thereby undermining the Afghan government’s legitimacy as the only representative of the Afghan people,” he wrote. “For the same reason, Kabul insists that the Taliban recognize the current constitution if they want to join talks.”

But the Taliban have repeatedly said they will not even talk to Karzai because he is considered a weak stooge — preferring to negotiate with his overlords in Washington.

Pakistan, which harbours many of the Taliban’s most vicious leaders who plan attacks on western and Afghan soldiers then run back across the border, also has a role to play and NATO will be aware of that as they plan how to get their soldiers out. It doesn’t bode well for peace, said Lucy Morgan Edwards, author of The Afghan Solution.

“For many reasons NATO is over a barrel with Pakistan mostly though with its concerns about the safety of getting its soldiers and equipment out of Afghanistan by 2014,” she said. “I think sadly that is the greater consideration for NATO and the U.S. regardless of the longer term security situation in Afghanistan.”

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