karzai-taliban peace talks

One other interesting aspect of that new poll about Afghan public opinion is what the poll found about the prospect of negotiating an end to the conflict with the Taliban:
Negotiations are another way forward – one with public support, but with preconditions. All told, 64 percent of Afghans say the government should negotiate a settlement [...]

In Afghanistan, you’ve got a war of unclear goals that everyone agrees has no military solution. But it’s also not clear if the alternative to open-ended conflict is to cut some kind of deal with Taliban elements — as increasingly-out-of-American-favor President Hamid Karzai has proposed — because it’s unclear whether elements of the Taliban would [...]

Today a cohort of progressive bloggers unveils a new effort against the planned 20,000-troop increase of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. A website called GetAfghanistanRight, set up by bloggers at the Seminal and Brave New Films — and with the support of Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel — went live today, with the intent of blogging [...]

The last time I heard Gen. David Petraeus, commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, talk about Afghanistan, he was endorsing the Karzai government’s efforts to explore negotiations with reconcilable elements of the Taliban. Now the Central Command chief is putting together a massive strategy review for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, [...]

The portrait of 2009’s passel of counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan is becoming clearer. Bolster troop levels. Recruit tribal militias to battle extremists, in a second-time-as-farce version of Iraq’s Anbar Awakening. Mitigate increasing distance with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in advance of elections. Work with the Big-T Taliban’s rejection of peace talks by pursuing negotiations with [...]

Is that your opening negotiation position, Mullah Omar?
From the BBC:

Taleban leader Mullah Omar has denied there are any talks under way to end the insurgency in Afghanistan, a statement from the organisation says.
He rejected reports he had written to the king of Saudi Arabia or the Afghan government about ending the conflict, the statement in [...]

In non-shoe-throwing news, Anand Gopal of the Christian Science Monitor does some great reporting about something called the Afghan Social Outreach Program, which is the Karzai government’s attempt at fracturing the insurgency and cleaving the “small-T” Taliban away from Al Qaeda. This would complement the top-down talks between Karzai and the Taliban:

Didn’t read this New York Times piece from the weekend about Afghanistan? Shame on you. Alleged relaxation is no excuse. I’ll stop talking to myself and quote from the piece:
Most of the additional American troops arriving in Afghanistan early next year will be deployed near the capital, Kabul, American military commanders here say, in a [...]

Noah Shachtman at Danger Room notices an ominous development. The Taliban appear to be relaxing their most severe doctrinal demands in order to increase their cohesive capability among the Afghan insurgency. Noah remarks:
In Iraq, we saw that Sunni jihadists’ extremism eventually repelled average people in Anbar province — and pushed them into American arms. The [...]

To call this unexpected is really quite an understatement. From the Associated Press:
President Hamid Karzai told a visiting U.N. Security Council delegation Tuesday that the international community should set a timeline to end the war in Afghanistan.