Afghanistan's president says he will not free thousands of Taliban prisoners ahead of all-Afghan power-sharing talks set for next week, publicly disagreeing with a timetable laid out just a day earlier in a U.S.-Taliban peace deal.
President Ashraf Ghani's comments point to the first hitch in implementing the fragile deal, which is aimed at ending America's longest war and getting rival Afghan factions to agree on their country's future.
Qatar's foreign minister tells The Associated Press in an interview that a prisoner swap is an important confidence-building measure.
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