Afghanistan and Pakistan Agree to Reopen Talks With an Absent Taliban

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan, Pakistan and the United States have agreed, once again, to restart peace talks with the Taliban, but there is still one big piece of the effort missing: the Taliban themselves.

The Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, returned home from an ice-breaking visit to Pakistan to contend not only with fallout from a skeptical and largely anti-Pakistan public, but also with the resignation of his intelligence chief and a new body count from the latest Taliban rampage: the siege of residential buildings in Kandahar, near the largest United States military base in southern Afghanistan.