karzai-taliban peace talks

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty got an exclusive interview with Hamid Karzai after yesterday’s presidential debate. The whole thing’s fairly predictable — Karzai lists his accomplishments in office and dismisses his critics — until Karzai slips this in:
“I repeat that the war on terrorism is not inside Afghanistan, as was the case in the past. This [...]

More from Gen. McChrystal’s interview with The Los Angeles Times’ Julian Barnes. Barnes asks McChrystal if there’s an opportunity to get members of the Taliban’s coalition to lay down arms:
There absolutely is and I don’t think it is necessarily not possible with the Taliban. Most of the fighters we see in Afghanistan are Afghans, some [...]

Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal expressed skepticism about the prospects for both cleaving al-Qaeda from the Taliban and for reincorporating the Taliban within the Afghan government. “I don’t think the Taliban have any reason to turn their back on al-Qaeda,” he told Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), saying it “might be easier to fragment the Taliban,” but [...]

PBS’ Margaret Warner is in Afghanistan and interviewed President Hamid Karzai for last night’s edition of the NewsHour. The interview showed a disjointed performance — the 17,000 additional troops ordered to Afghanistan by President Obama are seven years “too late” but he “welcomes” their presence anyway — especially when it came to which elements of [...]

What’s going on with the Afghanistan insurgent-reconciliation process? Last month, the Kabul government seemed disinclined to deal with the leadership of the insurgency, including the Taliban’s Quetta Shura and key factional chiefs like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaleddin Haqqani. But now the Christian Science Monitor’s Anand Gopal reports that the government has talks open with Haqqani’s [...]

Afghan Ambassador Said Jawad doesn’t like people saying candidly that his government and its NATO partners aren’t winning the war against the Taliban-led insurgency, but there’s little other way to describe this anecdote, reported in an excellent piece from The Washington Post on Sunday about southern Afghanistan:
When a man came to police headquarters recently to [...]

Reading President Obama’s endorsement of reconciliation efforts with the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan, I wondered the other day whether the U.S. military would repeat its efforts in Iraq and seek to cut deals with particular insurgent outfits independent of the national government. At yesterday’s Pentagon briefing, a reporter whom I gather to be the Los [...]

Obama to The New York Times:

Mr. Obama said on the campaign trail last year that the possibility of breaking away some elements of the Taliban “should be explored,” an idea also considered by some military leaders. But now he has started a review of policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan intended to find a new strategy, [...]

Counterinsurgency made-man Dave Kilcullen — you remember him: counterinsurgency adviser to David Petraeus and Condoleezza Rice — has expressed skepticism about negotiating with the Taliban in the past. But that may have been a definitional issue, whereby ‘Taliban’ works as a stand-in for ‘Afghan insurgency.’ Because in an interview with Reuters, via Small Wars Journal, [...]

Alas, I wasn’t on Air Force One this morning or I could have reported this at 11 a.m., but the transcript of the press gaggle has just come to me. And in it, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs announced something interesting: President Obama has tapped Bruce Riedel, a retired CIA official now at the [...]