The long, unsigned letter is being circulated via the Taliban’s official yet clandestine courier network. It was composed in secrecy by a small group of former Taliban operatives and ministers who sat down together last month in the Pakistani port city of Karachi. Their task was to identify the crucial issues the Taliban must confront before and after the proposed 2014 U.S. troop withdrawal. Although replete with predictable rhetoric about a decisive “military defeat of the Americans in Afghanistan,” the document offers an extraordinarily candid assessment of the group’s past failures and the “huge challenges” it will face if the Taliban regains or shares power in the future. Although the authors were not named, their identities were known to the group’s top leaders. (In fact, one was a longtime Newsweek source who goes by the single name Zabihullah.) Read More.
Interesting stuff. The Taliban are still making a propaganda effort towards reconciliation during the government's own agenda. Killing Rabbini was interpreted as a total rejection of negotiations, but the Taliban didn't want to negotiate with a Tajik figurehead. Just waiting for the right time to cut the best deal - somewhere around 2014, as they predict.
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