Peace talks between the US and the Taliban broke down in March mainly because the Afghan insurgents refused to agree to a deal by which guerrilla commanders released from Guantánamo Bay would remain under Qatari government supervision in Doha, a senior US administration official said.

The official said contacts have continued between the Kabul government and Taliban representatives, and that the US was also ready to resume talks.

Negotiations broke down in March after a failure to agree the fate of five insurgents, including three Taliban commanders, held in the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. In return, an American soldier, Bowe Bergdahl, was to have been freed by a Taliban affiliate, the Haqqani network, as part of a sequence of confidence-building measures leading to a ceasefire and broader talks between Kabul and the insurgency.

The collapse has been widely blamed on resistance in the US Congress and the Pentagon to allowing any Taliban prisoners to be released or transferred from Guantánamo. However, a senior administration official insisted the Obama administration had been ready to transfer the five prisoners to Qatar had the Taliban agreed to the conditions in Doha. The transfer would have required a "certification" from the defence secretary, Leon Panetta, guaranteeing to Congress that the Guantánamo inmates would not re-enter the fight against US troops.

"We had made a very good arrangement with the Qataris that they would have been supervised but not in jail. It would have been high-end. It would have been a heck of a lot better than Guantánamo," the official said. "We worked our way quite a long distance on this and I think if the Taliban had agreed to the final couple of conditions on this I think we would have certified.

"As the secretary of defence, you would want to certify that once these people were transferred to Qatar they didn't leave Qatar – they didn't go back to Afghanistan or Pakistan or go to London or go to conferences at Chatham House [a UK foreign policy thinktank]. Among the things we said was that if they go to Qatar they have to stay in Qatar. And they were not able to agree."

The Taliban announced they were suspending talks on 15 March, accusing American negotiators of being "shaky, erratic and vague".

However, the American official, in an unusually detailed account of the diplomatic effort, argued the breakdown had been caused largely by internal rifts within the insurgency.

"We were asking them some very hard questions they were having a difficult time answering. They were having a hard time motivating their fighters at that time, who were asking: why should people fight when some were in Doha talking to the United States?" the official said. "We've said in public and private that we are interested in getting back into that conversation, but that is up to them."

The direct contacts began in November 2010 after nine years of war, in a safe house near Munich provided by German intelligence, where US officials met Tayyab Agha, a confidant of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, in an encounter brokered by German officials and the Qatari royal family.

Further rounds of preliminary talks followed in Doha in February last year and again in Germany three months later, leading to the establishment of a Taliban "political office" in Doha at the beginning of this year. The talks in Doha focused largely on the five Guantánamo detainees, who included three senior commanders: Noorullah Noori, Mullah Fazel, and former interior minister Mullah Khairullah Khairkhwa.

The administration official said the Doha process had not been a total failure as the Taliban had kept representatives in Doha who have had direct contact with the government of Hamid Karzai, and had dispatched an official to a meeting in Kyoto in June also attended by Masoom Stanekzai, a Karzai adviser who runs the Afghan high peace council.

With the collapse of the talks in Doha, there is declining optimism in Washington over the prospects of a deal before the end of 2014, when US and other Nato combat troops are due to leave, leaving a residual force for training, counter-terrorism operations aimed at al-Qaida, and possibly counter-narcotics operations.

Lieutenant General David Barno, who commanded US and allied forces in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005, said: "The Taliban may feel that they will be in a better bargaining position after 2014 and they are prepared to fight on through the next two years."