Having told the reader what his intent was, Rosen described the Taliban as “religious students who knew little about the rest of the world and cared only about liberating their country from oppressive warlords.” Rosen concluded his piece by declaring that the war was lost –- unless we negotiated an ending with the Taliban.

Yes, only simpletons could believe that negotiating with the Taliban offers more hope than an open-ended conflict. Such simpletons include Hamid Karzai, David Petraeus, the Pakistani government and, increasingly, the Pentagon.

Good thing we have West to keep us on the straight and narrow.

I figured I’d impress my friend, who snuck into insurgent-controlled Falluja in 2004, by saying I was working on a trip to Afghanistan. Nice, right? “Oh, interesting,” he said, “I’m actually on my way there, too, to embed with the Taliban…”

Nir’s piece from that embed has just been published by Rolling Stone. It’s not an exaggeration to call it an instant classic of war reporting. There are so many brilliant parts that it’s hard to find just the right excerpt — check out the Taliban soldier who manages to be pro-Al Qaeda and anti-suicide bombing; or the moment it seems that Nir’s going to be executed — but I liked this a lot:

After our meeting, Ibrahim promised to contact the Taliban minister of defense and request approval for my trip. As I waited for word, I went to a market in Kabul and bought several sets of salwar kameez, the traditional tunic and baggy pants worn by Afghan men. I had grown my beard longer to pass as an Afghan, and before leaving New York I had supplemented my Arabic and basic Farsi with a week of Berlitz classes in Pashtu, the language spoken by the ethnic group that dominates the Taliban. Pashtu is not exactly in high demand, and the book Berlitz gave me was clearly designed for military purposes. It contained a list of military ranks, including “General of the Air Force,” and offered a helpful list of weapons, including “land mines” and “bullets.” It also provided the Pashtu translation for a host of important phrases: Show me your ID card. Let the vehicle pass. You are a prisoner. Hands up. Surrender. If I wanted to arrest an Afghan, I was now prepared. The book did not include the phrase I needed most: Ze talibano milmayam. “I am a guest of the Taliban.”

On a Saturday afternoon, Ibrahim picks me up in a white Toyota Corolla, its dashboard covered in fake gray fur. His friend Shafiq is behind the wheel, wearing a cap embroidered with rhinestones. Afghan culture places a premium on courtesy, and Shafiq comes across as unfailingly polite. At one point, almost casually, he mentions that he has personally executed some 200 spies, usually by beheading them. “First I warn people to stop,” he says, emphasizing his fair-mindedness. “If they continue, I kill them.”

Nir’s takeaway is that adding more troops to Afghanistan won’t work, and that we should prepare an exit strategy. A Taliban commander tells him that after NATO leaves, they’ll negotiate peace with the Afghan security forces: “They are brothers, Muslims.” It’s unclear whether they’d acknowledge the legitimacy of the Karzai government. But it seems sensible to open, and deepen, those negotiations immediately to determine what the price of Taliban buy-in is.

“Negotiation might be a great idea,” Rosen says, “but the Taliban may not feel like they should” negotiate, because they might get more out of a war with the Karzai government than by any promise of inclusion. The Taliban already have governors in Afghanistan loyal, or acquiescent, to them.

Interesting items from Nir’s Afghanistan trip:

The Taliban he talked to drew a distinction between the Afghan security forces (they kind of like them) and U.S. forces (they don’t like them).

Taliban commanders believed girls should go to school, “provided they were properly covered,” but if they went to school with boys “they’d contract HIV.”

They watched Al Jazeera and then “Indian soap operas, with women that were relatively scantily clad.”

With some of the Taliban, “I wouldn’t call them moderates or liberals,” but there’s a strain that Rosen describes as “pragmatic” and would negotiate with the Karzai government. In parts of Ghazni, the Taliban patrol openly, with RPGs out and everything.

Some of them talk about “fighting the Americans after they leave” as a matter of national pride. Police defected in Helmand to join the Taliban. In Ghazni, the Taliban governor actually issues Taliban passports.

“They’ve really taken over much of the countryside,” Rosen says, “I think the U.S. is incapable of defeating them. … There’s a real sense of hopelessness on the part of the international community in Kabul. … The Afghan government is a joke.”

Elections won’t save us, he says: negotiate with the Taliban, even if the Taliban might not go in for it.