US and Taliban negotiators held productive talks Tuesday, the insurgent group said, as potentially decisive discussions to enable Washington to draw down its deployment to Afghanistan entered their fifth day. Despite the Taliban’s upbeat assessment, the ninth round of talks in Qatar appeared to have lost some of its earlier momentum as negotiators wrangled over individual words and phrases in a draft deal. “We have progress in this round so we are finalising the remaining points,” Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen told journalists outside the up-market Doha members’ club where the talks are taking place.
