The commander is right... you'll never beat the Taliban

Nobody has ever conquered Afghanistan since Alexander the great!

The first serious talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban took place 10 days ago in Mecca under the auspices of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. During the discussions all sides agreed that the war in Afghanistan is going to be solved by dialogue and not by fighting. The Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, was not present but his representatives said he was no longer allied to al-Qa'ida.

The admission by a senior British Army commander, Mark Carleton-Smith, over the weekend that absolute military victory in Afghanistan is impossible has been overtaken by the talks in Mecca. "If the Taliban were prepared to sit on the other side of the table and talk about a political settlement, then that's precisely the sort of progress that concludes insurgencies like this," said Brigadier Carleton-Smith. "That shouldn't make people uncomfortable."

This sounds as if Britain's latest military venture in Afghanistan is going to end in a retreat with none of its ill-defined objectives achieved. In the US, an understanding of the real situation on the ground has been slower to come. John McCain and Barack Obama still speak as if a few more brigades of American soldiers sent to chase the Taliban around the mountains of southern Afghanistan would change the outcome of the war.

US policy in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein has been constantly denigrated as a recipe for self-inflicted disaster. But President Bush's policy in Afghanistan in the wake of the fall of the Taliban was just as catastrophically misconceived. In both countries the administration's agenda was primarily geared to using military victory to make sure that the Republicans won elections at home.

The Taliban has always been notoriously dependent on Pakistan and on the Pakistani military's intelligence service (ISI). It was the ISI which openly propelled the Taliban into power in the 1990s and covertly gave its militants a safe haven after their retreat from Afghanistan in 2001, enabling them to regroup and counter-attack. More