Wild Like Negotiations With the Taliban

The more I think about this business of holding talks with the Taliban the more it almost seems like a no-brainer to me. If back in September of 2001, the Taliban leadership had said “Holy shit! We never thought that was going to happen! Please don’t come over here and kill us — instead lets talk about how we can cooperate on handing key al-Qaeda people over” taking the deal clearly would have been the right policy.

They didn’t say that, so instead there was a war. And for a while it looked like the war would lead to a swift and thorough American victory, but that’s clearly not the case. At the same time, the Taliban’s prospects are much, much, much worse than they were on September 10, 2001. As usual, war breaks out because people miscalculate. It would have been better for the Taliban to turn against al-Qaeda in the fall of 2001, and it would have been smart for us to take them up on any such offer. Now, seven years later, if it’s really true that Mullah Omar’s willing to turn on al-Qaeda it seems to me that it’s clearly worth trying to explore a deal.