Talking to or with the Taliban

[davidbfpo]

The British General Nick Carter, 2ic ISAF, was interviewed this week and stated:

Back in 2002, the Taliban were on the run. I think that at that stage, if we had been very prescient, we might have spotted that a final political solution to what started in 2001, from our perspective, would have involved getting all Afghans to sit at the table and talk about their future...

Acknowledging that it was "easy to be wise with the benefit of hindsight", Carter added: "The problems that we have been encountering over the period since then are essentially political problems, and political problems are only ever solved by people talking to each other.

Curiously an observer of the Taliban suggests at one point they were trying to reach out.

Moving to the future General Carter is not unexpectedly optimistic:

What the opponents of the Afghan government now realise is they are likely to be up against capable Afghan security forces who are going to be here in perpetuity and therefore that old adage that 'We have the clocks but the Taliban have the time', has now been reversed. They are now up against security forces who have the time, and they are also Afghan forces … for those reasons I think that there is every chance people will realise that talking is the answer to this problem...

We owe it to all of those who have invested a great deal of effort in what we have been doing here since 2001 to see it through.

Link:http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013...er-afghanistan