General Joseph Dunford, the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Friday that he is cautiously optimistic about efforts to reach a negotiated end to the nearly 18-year-old Afghan war.

“We’re all cautiously optimistic, in the sense that Ambassador Khalilzad is now doing something we haven’t seen in the entire time that we’ve been deployed to Afghanistan,” said General Dunford.
Dunford made the remarks to a small group of reporters in Baghdad.
Recently, General Dunford visited Kabul on late Wednesday and Thursday and met with President Ghani alongside Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation, and discussed the Afghan peace process.
This comes as Khalilzad will begin his eighth round of talks with the Taliban after leaving Kabul for Doha.
Currently, he is in Kabul to discuss the Afghan peace process with different classes of the Afghan society. 
It is expected that the United States and the Taliban reach a peace agreement before the upcoming presidential election.