Marcy hit this too, but I can’t see Joint Task Force-Guantanamo officers going in for the Taliban’s request to free their detainees to participate in peace talks with Karzai. Why wouldn’t the Taliban just claim all Afghan detainees are big-time Taliban operatives and demand their freedom? But it’s a savvy strategy for the Taliban: make the U.S. appear like the obstacle to a peace deal if it doesn’t open the detention-facility doors.

Beyond Taliban strategy, there’s a question here for the Authorization to Use Military Force. Let’s say the peace talks are successful and some staggered truce/reconciliation process begins. At what point is the U.S. no longer at war with the Taliban, without law-of-war authority to detain battlefield combatants? Would the U.S. have to explicitly sign onto a Karzai/Taliban deal? From a strategy perspective, if the U.S. remains outside of any very hypothetical deal, the Taliban wouldn’t have any incentive to remain part of it.