It seems that this is indeed the case. President Karzai has been working very hard for a long time with our government and Taliban officials to bring this about. The thing now is that winning the war is not as important to NATO or the Taliban as finding some sort of resolution. Obviously the war has had a devastating effect on everyone involved. First of all it has affected the Afghan citizens who have had to bear the brunt of the hardships of the war. The war has caused them to lose many of their loved ones and has ravaged their countryside and economy.

The fact that Taliban leaders now seem to be receptive to peace talks speaks of the strategy which the United States put into place with the recent troop surge. Someone somewhere finally figured out that the strategy of trying to wipe out the Taliban just didnt make a whole lot of sense. There are Taliban fighters and al-Qaeda combatants who havent even been born yet. It is not a problem for these two organizations to replace lost members.

When the troop surge began one of the stated strategies was to really put pressure on the Talibans leaders to show them that it would not be in their best interests at all to continue with the war indefinitely. This was to be done through pressure on the battlefield as well as diplomacy from the leadership of Afghanistan. The President of Afghanistan also held out the olive leaf to them with the apparent blessing of the US government. This strategy took a while to catch on but it now seems to be working. There were a few Taliban leaders who were initially receptive to the plan and the number has begun to grow as time wears on.

Now there are Taliban leaders who are reaching back out to President Karzai for some type of peace plan. He has established an organization to come with a plan that will be acceptable to all. He has established the terms that are acceptable to him and the leaders who were reluctant to embrace these terms now seem to be softening up to them. The alternative is to continue in a costly and exhausting war with NATO.

Peace talks will begin shortly and the process will be a long drawn out one because the differences are deep and long running. Any progress will be the result of much patience and all of the diplomacy that President Karzai, the US, and NATO can muster. The peace council that President Karzai has appointed contains seventy members of mixed backgrounds. It seems like a good idea but the fact that its membership is so diverse tells me that there will be many obstacles to overcome because of the ethnic differences inherent in the council. After the council has ironed out its own differences the task of ironing out all of the differences between the factions of the Taliban will have to be addressed. It will be a long and difficult process but there is hope.

The conditions that Karzai has established before he will talk peace are that Taliban members must renounce violence. They will then have to sever all ties with terrorism, and embrace the constitution of the new Afghan government.

He is willing to repatriate them fully back into the government if they do so and assimilate them into government offices. Military Ring Express