Talking with the Taliban

last updated 8 January 2015

“What’s up with Hamid Karzai?” said Fred Kaplan in Slate. The Afghan president said he would welcome peace talks with Mullah Mohammed Omar, the brutal Taliban leader with a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head who harbored al Qaida and Osama bin Laden. U.S. commanders are open to "reaching out to ‘reconcilable’ Taliban fighters,” but “holding peace talks with Mullah Omar, or any other hard-core Taliban, is senseless” and dangerous.

Karzai’s offer is probably “a mere PR gimmick” designed to shore up domestic support before next year’s elections, said the Pakistan Observer in an editorial. But he’s right that there can be no peace in Afghanistan until the Taliban fighters—who “are part and parcel of the Afghan nation”—are brought “back to the national mainstream.”