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.
There’s a second round of discussions in the Karzai-Taliban peace dialogue about to get underway. If you’d like a comprehensive primer on the subject that doesn’t attempt to adjudicate any of the debates here, check out the Jamestown Foundation’s Chris Zambelis.
Interesting phone chat today with the Council on Foreign Relations’ Steve Biddle and Dan Markey, both of whom recently visited Afghanistan and shared some thoughts on the war. Neither is really hot on the prospects for what’s increasingly being called “reconciliation” between the Karzai government and the Taliban. More…
Over at Aviation Week’s Ares blog, Paul McLeary has a good and comprehensive overview of what smart counterinsurgents think should be done with respect to Karzai-Taliban talks. (Via Small Wars Journal.)
Yesterday Hamid Karzai offered Taliban leader Mullah Omar safe passage to Afghanistan for peace talks, a move that I considered a thrown gauntlet. Now Omar’s deputy, Mullah Brother — inhale the gloriousness of that name and let it waft through your nostrils — says no. And not just no, More…
Now this is outreach to the Taliban: Hamid Karzai just offered Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban’s leader, safe passage to negotiate in Afghanistan.
According to The New York Times’ John Burns, Karzai has just delivered a major gesture.
How can you tell when the Karzai-Taliban peace talks are gaining momentum? When Carlotta Gall of The New York Times writes a curtain-raiser on them.
Much of Gall’s story will be familiar to those who’ve been following this. But she presents a level of detail that no one’s More…
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