Word: talibanizing
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...allies have clearly recognized that those now fighting for the Taliban will be in Afghanistan long after Western armies leave. Britain's Foreign Secretary David Miliband, in a speech to NATO July 27, called on the Afghan government "to separate hard-line ideologues, who are essentially irreconcilable and violent and who must be pursued relentlessly, from those who can be drawn into domestic political processes." He was quickly followed by U.S. Afghanistan-Pakistan Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke, who told a BBC interviewer that "there is room in Afghan society for all those fighting with the Taliban who renounce al-Qaeda...
...most important obstacle to negotiating an acceptable compromise with the Taliban, however, is the fact that the insurgents - and a substantial part of the population - believe they're winning the war. That gives them no incentive to accept compromises offered by the government and the U.S. The purpose of the current U.S. "mini-surge" in Afghanistan, in fact, is largely to halt the Taliban's momentum, to create conditions, if not for victory, then for a stalemate in which growing numbers of fighters and commanders in the Taliban come to believe that they are unable to win on the battlefield...
...basic assumption of the U.S. political strategy in Afghanistan appears to be that the Taliban cannot be engaged from a position of weakness. Perceptions are exceedingly important in a warlord society with a long-established tradition of local commanders switching sides to back the force deemed most likely to prevail. It was that dynamic that explained the speed of the Taliban's capture of Kabul in a matter of months back in 1996. The same phenomenon saw its regime collapse even more rapidly when the U.S. invaded at the end of 2001. General McChrystal, in a recent interview...
When British forces entered Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001 in support of the U.S.'s fight against international terrorism, the aims of the deployment seemed clear and the effort justifiable. But as the conflict against the Taliban rumbles toward its ninth brutal year, America's most willing partner is asking the toughest of questions: How does this...
...British forces recently completed a major offensive against insurgents in southern Afghanistan's Helmand province - Operation Panther's Claw - that cleared the Taliban from swathes of the area. Now British war planners have called for an increase in troops to hold the land gained in that offensive. A report due out later this month by U.S. General Stanley McChrystal, head of NATO forces in the country, is widely expected to call for an even further increase of British commitment across the region. (Read TIME's interview with McChrystal...